Total Recalc
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Free · Open source · No account · Windows & Linux

Total Recalc

Open your mind. Not your file.

Watch Claude Code, Codex or any AI agent edit Excel, live. Total Recalc reloads the model as soon as the agent saves, keeps your place, and shows what was edited and what merely recalculated.

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v0.1.0 · Windows and Linux · all downloads

A recording of a real session: Claude Code rolls in a quarter's actuals, cuts a growth rate and lifts a margin in a demo model, and Total Recalc shows each change as it lands, down to the value per share.

Why not just open it in Excel?

  1. Excel holds the file open, so the agent can't save.

  2. Close it and reopen, and you're back on Sheet1, cell A1.

  3. And nothing tells you which of 10,000 cells moved.

Total Recalc reads your file into memory and lets go. Your agent writes; you watch.

Three things it does well

Never touches your file

No lock, no temp files beside it, no writes, so your agent can overwrite, replace or delete it at any time. A half-written file is never shown: the last good version stays on screen until the new one is complete.

Follows along

Every save lands on the same sheet, scrolled to the same place, with the same cells selected, even when the agent inserts rows above you. Press Space to pause and hold the version on screen while you talk it through; it keeps count of what's waiting.

Total Recalc after an agent save: still on the Income Statement with hardware revenue selected, now 224.3, was 217.2, recalculated.

Shows exactly what changed

Cells the agent edited are kept apart from cells that merely recalculated, so the headline reads "3 edits · 240 results", not a carpet of highlights. The Changes panel groups them by row with before-and-after sparklines, against a baseline you set. Rows are matched by their labels, so an inserted row is one new row, not a shift of everything below it.

The Changes panel: Revenue edited across 18 cells, a Services revenue row added, and recalculated rows with sparklines.
  • Inspector with inputs and dependents
  • Forecast boundary
  • Command palette
  • Light and dark
  • Excel's own number formats, fills and borders

Then hand it back to your agent

Select the cells you want to talk about and press Ctrl Shift C. Total Recalc copies them with their labels, formulas and what they used to be, ready to paste.

Clipboard
**northwind.xlsx** · sheet **Income Statement** · v3 · 22:05:09

- `M8` Hardware revenue · 1Q26E: **224.3** `=Assumptions!M7*Assumptions!M9` (was 217.2, +7.1 (+3.3%))
- `M17` Gross margin · 1Q26E: **46.0%** `=M16/M7`
- `V17` Gross margin · FY27E: **48.5%** `=V16/V7` (was 47.0%, +1.5pp)
You

Why is the 2027 margin up 1.5 points? Lift it to 49% and show me the bridge.

Agent

Done: 2027 gross margin set to 49.0% in Assumptions. The bridge is on a new Margin bridge sheet.

Total Recalc: 8 edits · 1 sheet added

Install

Version 0.1.0 · changelog · checksums · built by GitHub Actions from the tagged commit

Installertotalrecalc-windows-x64-setup.exeRecommended Portabletotalrecalc.exeNo install; needs WebView2, built into Windows 10 and 11
  1. Run the installer, then open Total Recalc from the Start menu and drag a workbook onto the window. With the portable build, run it with the workbook:
    .\totalrecalc.exe "C:\path\to\model.xlsx"

  2. The first time, Windows may show this. Total Recalc isn't code-signed yet, so Windows doesn't recognise the publisher. Choose More info, then Run anyway, if you trust the release: it is built in public by GitHub Actions from the tagged source, and you can check the file against the published checksums. Some managed work PCs won't allow unsigned apps at all; ask your IT team, and please don't turn protection off.

AppImagetotalrecalc-linux-amd64.AppImagex86-64 Linux with glibc 2.35 or later Debian / Ubuntutotalrecalc-linux-amd64.debInstalls the totalrecalc command
  1. AppImage: make it executable and run it with a workbook.
    chmod +x totalrecalc-linux-amd64.AppImage ./totalrecalc-linux-amd64.AppImage model.xlsx

    If it complains about FUSE: sudo apt install libfuse2t64 on Ubuntu 24.04 (libfuse2 on older releases).

  2. Debian or Ubuntu:
    sudo apt install ./totalrecalc-linux-amd64.deb totalrecalc model.xlsx
  3. Used daily on Arch with Hyprland (Wayland) on an NVIDIA card. If the window stays blank or exits with "Error 71", try WEBKIT_DISABLE_DMABUF_RENDERER=1 totalrecalc model.xlsx: it works everywhere, but is slower on large high-resolution screens.
  1. Install Rust (stable), Node 22, pnpm 10 and the Tauri prerequisites for your platform. On Debian or Ubuntu:
    sudo apt install build-essential curl wget file libwebkit2gtk-4.1-dev \ libxdo-dev libssl-dev libayatana-appindicator3-dev librsvg2-dev patchelf
  2. Build it:
    git clone https://github.com/thomasrice/totalrecalc.git cd totalrecalc pnpm install --frozen-lockfile pnpm tauri build
  3. macOS is untested. If you try it, build without installers (pnpm tauri build --no-bundle) and tell us how it goes.

Watch it follow an agent in two minutes

The repository includes a small demo model and a script that plays an agent revising it every few seconds.

git clone https://github.com/thomasrice/totalrecalc.git && cd totalrecalc totalrecalc demo/northwind.xlsx & uv run --with openpyxl demo/agent.py demo/northwind.xlsx

With the AppImage, use its path in place of totalrecalc. No uv? pip install openpyxl, then python demo/agent.py demo/northwind.xlsx. On Windows, start Total Recalc and drag demo\northwind.xlsx onto it first.

Good to know

Does anything leave my machine?

No. The app makes no network requests and has no telemetry. It reads the file you open and nothing else. This website has no analytics and sets no cookies.

Can it edit the spreadsheet?

No, by design. It never writes to the file, never locks it, and never creates files beside it. Editing is your agent's job.

Which files and formulas does it handle?

.xlsx and .xlsm (Google Sheets: export as .xlsx). Every version is recalculated by a built-in engine, IronCalc. Where it can't evaluate a formula faithfully (INDIRECT, OFFSET, links to other workbooks), it shows the value Excel saved in the file and marks it. Files written by scripts often carry no saved values, so there the engine's result is all there is, and a formula it can't calculate is marked unavailable rather than guessed.

What doesn't it show?

Charts and images aren't drawn, and formatting-only changes aren't reported as changes. It's a viewer for numbers and formulas.

How quickly does it update?

About a second after the file stops changing. Very large workbooks take longer to recalculate; the previous version stays on screen meanwhile, and the top bar says it's recalculating.

Why "Total Recalc"?

It recalculates everything, every time, and the previous value is always one key away. And yes, the film.

Does it run on a Mac?

It should build, but it's untested. See Build from source.

Is it really free?

Yes. MIT licensed, no account, no paid tier. Issues and pull requests are welcome on GitHub.

Open your mind. Not your file.

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