I’ve been struggling with this the past couple of days, and I can’t for the life of me figure out how to proceed. I have a need for simple, lightweight spreadsheets that can be both viewed and edited directly from within DEVONthink that can also do basic spreadsheet functions (e.g., summing to a particular cell), automatically numbered rows, etc.). Ideally, though likely impossible, I’d like to be able to add my existing Numbers files to DEVONthink such that they can be both viewed and edited without having to open the file externally. Alternatively, sheets would appear to be the answer, except they are functionally not spreadsheets in spite of their name—hence my confusion and frustration over the past couple of days. I understand now that sheets are in fact just tables of plain text that can’t really do anything. I understand now that scripts are required to perform basic calculations, except scripts are not accessible in DEVONthink To Go, nor do they populate the calculation into a cell. [Bug] Also, there’s a problem with the Row Sum & Mean Value script in that it leaves out n-2 columns and does not sum all the cells across the row. At first, I thought perhaps this was by design to leave the last column out if it held a manually calculated sum, but then I saw Check sums in last column (which is also leaving out columns). Column Sum & Mean Value is working as expected. Incidentally, is there a way to force DEVONthink to remember the width of your columns? It resets on my every time I click away and back again.
Exporting sheets to spreadsheets and back again is not really feasible—may as well just open the spreadsheets from the start, even though that’s what I was trying to avoid. It’s the least work of the given options. [Bug?] So, now I add my Numbers files to DEVONthink and there’s a lot of white space in the preview window, even though everything (DEVONthink, MacBook, Numbers) is set to dark mode. This is quite distracting and hard on my eyes. Meanwhile, there is no white space at all in the preview window for these files in DEVONthink To Go. I was convinced I was missing a background colour setting somewhere, but I cannot find it (every available setting in preferences is already dark).
[Feature request] Native spreadsheet capabilities. Users have been asking for this as far back as 2006 from what I saw digging through support topics on the subject. Originally, I bought DEVONthink for uni research projects, but I’m now wanting to expand its use to personal matters as well. Often when I can’t work a thing out in my head, I make a spreadsheet to organise my thoughts, so I end up with a lot of little spreadsheets. In fact, I put almost everything in my life into spreadsheets, but managing scores of files has become tiresome (I still love spreadsheets though). I’ll admit that DEVONthink wasn’t my first choice for this use case, mainly because it never occurred to me. I started out with Notion (yes, I understand Notion and DEVONthink are vastly different programs), and the little bite-sized spreadsheets with (usually) just enough functionality were a dream come true—I could finally organise other things relevant to the data I was trying to manage…except then I discovered Notion isn’t E2EE…and any files you add are uploaded to their servers…and there’s no offline mode…and, well, a slew of problems really. Then I tried Obsidian, but trying to manage my data in markdown was untenable, as was the of organising relevant files together. That’s when it struck me that DEVONthink must surely be the answer and why didn’t I think of it sooner—surely DEVONthink can do this…my disappointment has been immeasurable. I desperately hope DEVONthink will consider adding this functionality in the future. I’ll buy it all over again for this feature alone.
