Featured sheets

Get a taste of how Dirigible differs from a traditional spreadsheet and learn how to generate formulae using Python code. This spreadsheet, from the first part of our tutorial, aims to get you started with Dirigible as quickly as possible.

Dirigible introduces the concept of usercode to spreadsheets. This powerful concept gives you, the spreadsheet designer, enormous power over the spreadsheet calculation process. This sheet, from the second part of the tutorial, explains more about the different parts of the usercode, how they interact and how you can add your own code to modify Dirigible's behaviour.

One of Dirigible’s greatest strengths is that cells in the spreadsheet grid aren’t limited to holding numbers or text – each and every cell can hold any kind of Python object. What this means is that one cell can contain an essentially unlimited amount of data, which can then be processed in bulk by your formulae – meaning less duplication and easier maintenance. This spreadsheet, from the third part of our tutorial, takes advantage of that, and of Python's NumPy library for numerical calculations.

When you run a Dirigible spreadsheet, the Python code that is executed runs on specially-secured and programmed Internet servers. Sets of Dirigible spreadsheets can be structured to take advantage of this, delegating different tasks to different servers, so that your calculations are performed in parallel across the grid for the fasted possible calculation time. This spreadsheet, from the fourth part of our tutorial, shows how to do use that to calculate detailed orbits of the planets (and Pluto).

Dirigible can run many long-running calculations in parallel. This spreadsheet checks supermarket prices for a number of products using another Dirigible spreadsheet (Single item supermarket sweep), which scrapes the web pages of supermarkets.

Dirigible provides many useful Python libraries. This spreadsheet demonstrates the use of urllib, mechanize and BeautifulSoup to scrape information from web pages into a Dirigible spreadsheet. It is used by "Supermarket sweep using run_worksheet", another featured sheet.

This spreadsheet shows a simple option pricing model - the basic Black-Scholes - demonstrating some of the basic features of Dirigible that are of use to financial analysts: statistical tools from numpy/scipy, and simple user-defined functions in the grid

This spreadsheet demonstrates easy re-use of existing spreadsheet models. We've already set up a pricing model for a single option as a Dirigible worksheet. This worksheet can then be used as a function from within another sheet, in order to price multiple options. No need for complex cut & paste and fill down operations, and our model is stored in a single place making it easier to maintain.

This sheet works out who hosts the websites of a number of companies -- most importantly, most of the Y Combinator-funded companies from January 2010 onwards. Amazon AWS (perhaps unsurprisingly) is the winner.