Omasheet & Markdown: the Text-native spreadsheet
Markdown was invented by John Gruber as an easy way to type in content for an HTML website. Something like:
# Heading
## Sub-heading
Paragraph with **bold** and _italic_ styles.
And a table:
| Name | Age |
|------|-----|
| Alex | 20 |
| Sam | 25 |
And a [link](https://omasheet.org)
---
And here’s how it looks (since this post is written in markdown too)!
Heading
Sub-heading
Paragraph with bold and italic styles.
And a table:
| Name | Age |
|---|---|
| Alex | 20 |
| Sam | 25 |
And a link
It has become ubiquitous everywhere that text is used in computing - and it is a foundation of source control software such as GitHub where it is used for all general text such as documentation, issues write ups and review notes. Every AI system uses markdown for storing prompts such as AGENTS.md. There is a slew of products built around markdown such as Bear, Obsidian, Omawrite, OmaZettel and many websites use it for posts like Reddit, Stack Overflow, Hackernews.
On the other hand.
Spreadsheets such as MS Excel and Google Sheets can all work with a comma separated values (.csv) file. Take a look at the markdown table above - yes, that’s a set of pipe separated values (the | char is called a pipe btw). So, why not just employ the markdown table as a way to store sheet data - just spell csv slightly differently? That’s the Omasheet strategy.
The Omasheet app not only talks pipe separated values, it is built with them at it’s core. Here’s the source code of an .omx file:
sheet Ages
| Name | Age |
| ---- | --- |
| Alex | 20 |
| Sam | 25 |
See what I mean. And here’s how it looks in the app:
Why it matters: Omasheet (.omx) files can be read in a text editor, searched with standard tools, edited in code reviews, stored in Git, and generated or modified by scripts and AI agents. Spreadsheet content becomes a first-class part of a software or documentation repository.
Contrast this with established spreadsheet formats like Excel’s XLSX. Although XLSX is built on XML, its data is packaged inside a ZIP archive, spread across multiple interdependent files. This makes the underlying source difficult to read, review and track in version control.
This month saw Excel’s 41st birthday - congratulations! But time for a fresh approach.
~librasteve
PS. Click on feed below if you would like to hear more about the unqiue qualities of Omasheet…
