Docs Casual Sheets

Plan

Phased roadmap, scope, and what is in/out for Casual Sheets.

Web-based Excel-equivalent with real-time co-editing. Upload .xlsx → open in browser → multiple users edit together, anonymously, no accounts.

Scope

In scope

  • Excel / Office UX: ribbon, formula bar, file-centric workflow.
  • Upload .xlsx → open in a shared room → download back as .xlsx.
  • Multi-user co-editing in real time (cursors, selections, live typing).
  • In-memory sessions — state lives while at least one user is connected, with a grace-period GC after the last client leaves.
  • Optional Redis persistence for sessions that survive server restarts.

Out of scope (deferred)

  • Persistence / WOPI — no DB, no autosave to disk, no SharePoint/OneDrive integration.
  • Auth / accounts — anonymous sessions identified by room URL.
  • AI / LLM features — the Univer command bus is extensible; plug your own model in later.
  • Mobile — desktop browsers only.

Out of scope (forever)

  • 100% Excel feature parity — Excel has 30+ years of features; we ship the 80% that matter.
  • Pixel-perfect Office clone — “clearly inspired by / familiar to Office users” is the bar.

Phase status

✅ Phase 0 — Spikes (complete)

All three technical risks proved out:

  • Spike A (Yjs bridge) — two browsers, edits visible in < 250 ms.
  • Spike B (xlsx round-trip) — ExcelJS parse + export with acceptable fidelity.
  • Spike C (UI override) — Univer default chrome hidden, custom ribbon wired.

✅ Phase 1 — Single-user Excel-flavored editor (complete)

  • Custom Office-style ribbon: Home, Insert, Formulas, Data, View, Review tabs.
  • Formula bar with editable Name Box.
  • Status bar: SUM / AVG / COUNT / MIN / MAX, zoom, sheet tabs.
  • Full xlsx / ods / csv / tsv open + save, worker-side.
  • All major Excel keyboard shortcuts.
  • 337 Playwright e2e tests locking the surface.

✅ Phase 2 — Real-time co-editing (complete)

  • Hocuspocus server + Yjs bridge plugin.
  • Room lifecycle: create on upload, GC after TTL.
  • Share URL: anyone joins. Password-protected rooms with SHA-256 gate.
  • View-only role enforced at the Univer engine layer.
  • Redis persistence (optional, 7-day TTL).
  • Joiner fast-path: gzip-streamed snapshot, skips xlsx parse.
  • Op-log compaction (Stage 6) for long-lived rooms.
  • Self-hosted Docker image: web + Hocuspocus + Fastify in one container.

✅ Phase 3 — Presence + polish (complete)

  • Peer cursors on the grid (scroll-tracked, frozen-pane-aware, zoom-aware).
  • Live-typing ghost: characters appear in the peer’s cell as they type.
  • Presence avatars with “Active now / Last seen Ns ago” tooltips.
  • “Waiting to reconnect” banner + faster offline detection.
  • Divergence detector: amber “Out of sync” pill when state vectors diverge.
  • Session-history side panel: per-room op log, timestamps, revert.

✅ Phase 4 — Feature breadth + co-edit fidelity (complete — v0.0.5)

  • Charts P1–P5b: insert dialog, 8 chart types, drag/resize, format dialog, collab sync, PNG embed in xlsx.
  • Pivot tables P0: group-by + aggregate from Insert menu.
  • Conditional formatting, data validation, drawings — all co-edit synced.
  • Workbook/worksheet metadata (tab colors, zoom, freeze, sheet visibility) co-edit synced.
  • Autosave to IndexedDB with restore banner on reload.
  • ODS fidelity: styles, dimensions, freeze, hyperlinks, comments, defined names.
  • 30+ additional Excel keyboard shortcuts.

✅ Phase 5 — Excel-parity wave (complete — v0.0.6)

  • Analysis tools: Name Manager (Ctrl+F3), Flash Fill (Ctrl+E), Goal Seek (iterative solver dialog).
  • Pivot tables P1: filter fields, Refresh PivotTables, drill-down to contributing source rows (Ctrl+Shift+D).
  • Charts: trendlines, date-axis detection, per-series colour overrides.
  • Sparklines: in-cell mini-charts (line / column / win-loss), workbook resource persistence for xlsx round-trip.
  • Show Formulas (Ctrl+`): non-destructive DOM overlay that paints formula source on every formula cell.
  • Print Area: A1 field in Page Setup + File-menu “Set / Clear Print Area” against the active selection.
  • Recent Files landing: IndexedDB-backed, last-10 entries, surfaced when the workbook is a blank Untitled.
  • Paste Special dialog (Ctrl+Alt+V): 6 Univer-native paste modes wired through the standard mutation path.
  • Server-side view-only enforcement: Hocuspocus onAuthenticate flips connection.readOnly so view-role joiners can’t bypass the client gate.
  • Theme: dark mode toggle (title-bar sun/moon), bridged to Univer’s ThemeService so the canvas chrome flips too.
  • Shell rewrites: Google-Docs-style merged title bar (logo + filename + menus + actions), right-edge panel rail (Tables / Charts / Outline / Comments / History), brand mark aligned with sister doc-editor.
  • Inline SVG icons: ~155 components covering every name the app uses; sharp at every size, no font-load delay.
  • Local version history: snapshot store + preview + restore in single-user mode.
  • Status-bar customisation: right-click checklist (Average / Count / Sum / Min / Max / Numerical Count).
  • Multi-range presence: peer cursors render every range in a Ctrl-click selection.
  • NamePill: in-room name edit affordance.
  • Quick wins: Ctrl+Alt+L re-apply filter, Ctrl+[ / Ctrl+] precedent / dependent navigation.

What’s next

P6 — Remaining gaps (small)

AreaWhat’s needed
PivotsMulti-row-field with Excel’s compact layout ✅ (P1.5 — outer subtotals + indented inner rows + grand total; sub-row dropdown on Insert dialog; drill-down follows the full composite key path)
xlsx round-tripVBA stub passthrough ✅ (lossiness audit now 46/46 — .xlsm files round-trip macros byte-equal). Complex pivot cache deferred to P6.1 (rel renumbering + workbook.xml surgery); numfmt long tail ✅
UXDisplay-name edit surface post-join ✅ (join prompt now carries a “Joining as” field so users can override their stored name BEFORE peers see them; NamePill stays the post-join surface)

P6.1 — Complex pivot cache passthrough (deferred)

xlsx files authored with pivot tables currently lose the xl/pivotCaches/** and xl/pivotTables/** parts on round-trip. The clean fix is the same byte-passthrough pattern shipped for VBA, but pivots need extra OOXML surgery: rel renumbering across xl/_rels/workbook.xml.rels + xl/worksheets/_rels/sheet*.xml.rels and injection of <pivotCaches> into the ExcelJS-regenerated xl/workbook.xml. Estimated 2 days. Slot in alongside the home/templates work as a side track.

P7 — WOPI host integration (deferred)

When persistence is required: add a Hocuspocus persistence adapter (Postgres or S3-backed) and implement the WOPI host contract. The collab layer doesn’t change — only the storage backend.

P8 — Scale (deferred)

  • Op-log scale for multi-hour rooms (current Stage-6 compaction is fine for typical sessions; bound growth more aggressively when we see real pressure).
  • Horizontal scale-out: single-process today.

Architecture reference

See docs/ARCHITECTURE.md for the full diagram and data flows.

ConcernPick
Grid + formula engineUniver OSS 0.24.x
FrontendReact 18 + Vite + TypeScript strict
CollabYjs + Hocuspocus over WebSocket
xlsx I/OExcelJS in Web Workers
ods / csv / tsv@e965/xlsx in Web Workers
ChartsECharts overlay anchored to cell ranges
PersistenceRedis optional, 7-day TTL
ContainerNode 22 Alpine, multi-arch (amd64 + arm64)
TestsPlaywright (Chromium), 337 e2e tests

Synced from PLAN.md in schnsrw/sheets. To update: edit upstream and re-run npm run sync-docs.