Solenoid

Solenoid is a node graph calculator visual alternative/companion to Excel. It contains all relevant Excel functions, plus many additional functions and utilities.

Data Type Separation

Solenoid distinguishes between the Numeric, String, Date, Complex, & Boolean data types and doesn't allow you to mistakenly wire a data type to a function which doesn't accept it. It also enforces a dimensionality pattern- singular values can flow into 1-D lists (CSV rows), which can flow into 2-D arrays of a uniform data type, and the reverse is blocked.

Dimensionality

Solenoid sockets also carry information about their dimensionality for their inputs and outputs. A value can be a Scalar, List (1-D CSV row), Matrix (2-D CSV), Frame, or Cube.

The Frame object consists of uniform data-type columns with headers. The Cube object is a 3D data table where cells can themselves hold any value or dimensioned object, allowing you to nest arrays within arrays and quickly drill down to the data you need.

Unit Passthrough

The Value Input and Format Controller nodes assign both a display format and units to your data. A value with an assigned unit (such as USD, radians, or square meters) is locked to that unit until transformed by some other function, so a value of 5 with the unit "meters", multiplied by 2, will become 10+"meters".

Formula Surface

The Expression (1-way) and Equation (2-way) nodes allow you to input formulas for any node in typical Excel syntax. The LAMBDA node allows you to input a formula which can be re-used in various places.

Data Operations

Solenoid contains the table verb nodes for which you'd normally need to use Power Query. These operate on Frames and Cubes; table verb nodes are not accessible via the Formula input surfaces.

Form Input and Records

The Frame Input node allows you to define a custom Form Input layout for inputting and browsing records with checkboxes and date pickers. The Record node lets you browse records and renders them as a Chart for re-use.

Document Surface

• The Note node is a free-floating in-canvas markdown text box node which takes YAML frontmatter and exposes the values as output sockets.
• The Report node allows you to write a markdown document in Knap, Obsidian's template language: {{ name }} defines an input socket and renders the wired value inline with the text. You can input values, lists, tables, and even Charts directly into a markdown document for easy report generation, or wire a table into the Records socket to generate one page per row.
• On the desktop version of the app, define an Obsidian vault folder to import and write notes directly to the vault, read a whole folder of notes as one table, and pull tasks from the TaskNotes plugin. The web version bundles a demo vault so you can try it without one.

Try it

solenoid-ngc.com runs in your browser, on desktop and mobile. For improved performance, you can enable the HTML-in-Canvas experimental Chrome flag and enable usage of that renderer in Settings.

Unsupported Features

• Accounts, cloud sync, multiplayer editing
• Conditional Formatting in tables

Desktop

The desktop app (Windows and Linux) runs the relational verbs on a native Rust (Polars) engine for memory-heavy tables. The web build uses an identical in-process JS engine.

From source

The web build needs only Node 20+, no Rust:

npm install
npm run dev          # http://localhost:1420, hot reload

The desktop build additionally needs the Rust toolchain and Tauri's platform prerequisites, see tauri.app/start/prerequisites. On Windows: the WebView2 runtime (preinstalled on Windows 11) and the MSVC C++ build tools. On Linux: WebKitGTK 4.1 and the build packages that page lists for your distro.

npm run tauri dev    # runs the desktop window live (starts the frontend itself)
npm run tauri build  # production build → src-tauri/target/release/

On Windows tauri build emits the portable solenoid.exe plus an installer under target/release/; on Linux, the solenoid binary plus an AppImage, a .deb and an .rpm. Add -- --no-bundle to build just the binary.

License

MIT, see LICENSE. The node canvas is built on React Flow by xyflow; the graph model runs on Rete.js and the desktop relational engine is Polars. Full third-party credits are in THIRD-PARTY-NOTICES.md.