Native SheetsFeatures
What Native Sheets does
The capabilities of the Native Sheets macOS editor, in detail: round-trip fidelity for parts it does not model, and a dependency-ordered formula engine, with the limits of each.
In detail
Round-trip fidelity: saving without rewriting the whole file
Native Sheets keeps the raw bytes of every part of an .xlsx package and regenerates only the parts it models, so charts, pivot caches and themes survive a save.
The formula engine: dependency-ordered recalculation
How Native Sheets parses, orders and recalculates formulas, what it does with circular references, and how references shift when rows and columns move.
Everything else it does
| Capability | What that means |
|---|---|
| Saves back what it does not understand | The reader keeps the raw bytes of every part of the original file. Saving regenerates only the parts the editor models. |
| A dependency-ordered formula engine | About 90 functions across maths, statistics, logic, text, lookup and dates, recalculated in dependency order. |
| Multi-sheet workbooks | Sheets appear as tabs along the bottom: add, rename, duplicate, reorder by dragging, and delete. |
| Keyboard editing with uniform undo | Arrow keys move, Shift-arrow extends, Command-arrow jumps to the edge of the data, Tab and Return move on after committing. |
| Formatting and number formats | Bold, italic, underline, alignment, wrapped text, merged cells, frozen panes, and number formats including dates, percentages and currency. |
| No runtime and no third-party dependencies | The ZIP container, the XML, the number formats, the formula engine and the grid are all implemented in the app's own repository. |
Limits
- Charts, images, pivot tables and conditional formatting are preserved through a save but are neither displayed nor editable.
- There is no find and replace, no sorting or filtering, and no cell comments.
- Printing is only what NSDocument provides for free.
- Formula support is a wide subset rather than the whole of Excel's function list. Array formulas, INDIRECT, OFFSET and defined names are not evaluated, though defined names survive a save.
- The app runs on macOS 14 or later. It is a universal binary, so Apple Silicon and Intel Macs both run it, but there is no Windows, Linux, iOS or web build of the editor itself.
- The app is distributed outside the App Store, so it updates by downloading a new build rather than through the App Store.