RixSheets is the spreadsheet app inside Rixoffice, and it is built for people who want real Excel compatibility without handing their files to a cloud. The editor pairs the Univer grid framework with a custom Rust xlsx engine running as a sidecar process, so RixSheets opens and saves genuine .xlsx, .xls and .csv files — formulas, formats, multiple sheets and all — while every calculation stays on your desktop. This page gets you from an empty grid to a working workbook, and points you to the deeper guides for formulas, pivots, charts and AI.
Why you will feel at home
RixSheets follows the conventions you already know: a grid of columns and rows, a name box and formula bar above it, sheet tabs below, and the shortcuts you have used for years — Ctrl+C, Ctrl+V, Ctrl+Z, F2 to edit a cell. What sits underneath is where it earns its place:
- A full formula engine covering math, statistical, financial, logical, lookup, text and date-time functions — SUMIFS, VLOOKUP, INDEX/MATCH, IRR, NPV, PMT and hundreds more, all evaluated locally.
- The analysis toolkit Excel users expect: pivot tables with a PivotDialog, pivot charts, slicers, a timeline panel, Subtotal, Consolidate, Advanced Filter, duplicate removal, sort, auto filter, data validation and conditional formatting.
- An AI chat panel with workbook tools that reads ranges, cells and formats, explains formulas and proposes operations — with AI pages unlimited on every plan.
Open or create your first workbook
- Launch Rixoffice and click New Tab, then choose New Sheet. To continue existing work, use File, Open and pick a .xlsx, .xls or .csv file.
- Click any cell and start typing. Press Enter to move down, Tab to move right, and hold Shift to move back the other way.
- Type an equals sign to begin a formula, for example =SUM(B2:B20), then press Enter to calculate.
- Select your numbers and open Format Cells to apply currency, percent or date formats.
- Press Ctrl+S to save. New workbooks save as .xlsx by default; File, Save As also offers .xls and .csv.
- Open the AI panel from the toolbar and try a prompt such as: summarize the totals by region.
The parts of the window
| Area | What it does |
|---|---|
| Name box | Shows the active cell reference; type an address or range to jump straight there |
| Formula bar | Displays and edits the true contents of the active cell, formulas included |
| Sheet tabs | Switch between worksheets; double-click a tab to rename it |
| Status bar | Quick sum, count and average for whatever you have selected |
| AI panel | Chat with tools that read and operate on the open workbook |
A ten-minute starter exercise
Run through this once and you will have touched the core features:
- In row 1, type the headers Product, Region, Units and Price.
- Fill in eight rows of sample data, then select the numbers and apply a currency format from the Format Cells dialog.
- Below the data, build a small summary: =SUM for total units, =AVERAGE for the mean price, and a SUMIFS that adds units for one region only.
- Select the table and use Insert, Pivot Table to open the PivotDialog. Drag Region into rows and Units into values, then close the dialog and inspect the result.
- With the same selection, insert a column chart and place it beside the pivot.
- Save the file as starter.xlsx, close it, reopen it, and confirm every formula and format survived the round trip.
Work offline, stay local
RixSheets is a desktop editor, not a browser tab. The grid, the formula engine, pivots, charts and validation all run on your machine, so a flight, a rural connection or a strict corporate network changes nothing. Your workbooks live in folders you choose, and the only moment the network matters is when you sign in, check for updates or use a cloud AI provider — and if you run local models through Ollama, even AI stays fully offline.
That architecture has a second benefit people notice after a week: speed. There is no upload wait, no sync spinner, no browser tab hoarding a gigabyte of memory for a 40,000-row sheet. The Rust xlsx engine parses large files at native speed, so the workbook you were told to "just open in Excel, it takes a minute" opens here in seconds. Files from colleagues, exports from business systems, legacy .xls from a department that never upgraded — all of it lands in the same grid, ready for the same features.
It also means your habits survive software changes. Nothing about a RixSheets workbook is held hostage in a database or a cloud account: the file is the file, on your disk, in a format the rest of the world reads. Where AI fits in
The AI chat panel is not a bolt-on search box. It carries workbook tools: it can read ranges, cells and formats, propose operations for you to approve before anything changes, explain what an unfamiliar formula does, and generate written summaries of your data. Ask it to draft a SUMIFS, sanity-check a pivot source, or describe a region's performance in plain language.
Because AI pages in RixSheets are unlimited on every plan, you can experiment freely without watching a credit meter. New users get the most out of it by treating the panel as a tutor in the first week — ask why a formula behaves a certain way, ask for a faster route to a summary you just built by hand — and as a reviewing assistant later, when the workbook belongs to someone else and you need to trust it quickly.
What to explore next
- RixSheets formulas and functions — the function library, the Insert Function dialog and trace arrows.
- Pivot tables in RixSheets — build your first PivotDialog summary.
- RixSheets AI chat panel — what the assistant reads, explains and proposes.
- Import and export CSV and XLSX — moving data in and out cleanly.
- Charts in RixSheets — pictures from your first numbers.
- Format Cells dialog — make the grid presentable as you go.