Sethera Piece
— Visual Strategy Board

Count by enclosing — no cells required

Much of what we do in spreadsheet software isn't actually "spreadsheeting." Cells become graph paper for laying out forms, seat charts get merged-cell mazes, and totals are still tallied by hand — the classic spreadsheet abuse where a tool built for one job is borrowed for another.

Sethera Piece drops the borrowed framework and changes the idea. The canvas has no cells. You place "pieces" of text and numbers wherever you like, then draw an aggregation zone around them — and the total appears. Move a piece out of a zone and the total drops; drop it into another zone and that one grows. The math is always live: the layout itself is the formula.

Why "Sethera"?

The name comes from Yan Tan Tethera, a counting rhyme once used by shepherds in northern England (yan, tan, tethera = one, two, three). Counting sheep on your fingers is probably humanity's oldest form of aggregation. This tool — counting pieces by surrounding them — is its modern descendant.

The other image is a strategist sliding pieces across a sand table. Move the pieces and the situation changes; when the situation changes, so does your judgment. Sethera Piece is a board where moving things changes the math.

Endless uses

"Place numbers, enclose them, move them" — that's all it takes, yet the uses keep growing.

• Budget allocation Distribute budget pieces across per-department zones. Every move instantly updates each department's total
• Effort assignment Deal task-effort pieces into per-member boxes and rebalance while watching the load
• Event & travel budgets Spread cost pieces across days or categories — every reshuffle updates each group's total on the spot
• Freelance invoicing Assemble a one-page quote or invoice from pieces and ruled lines, with live math down to the grand total
• Workshops & retrospectives Drag sticky notes into voting zones and the tally is done. The "counting" chore disappears
• Estimates & quotes Lay out a form with ruled lines and a paper frame, then wire subtotal → tax → total with calculation pieces

Move a piece, and the math changes

Aggregation zones constantly watch what's inside them. The moment a piece enters — or leaves — a zone, the result is recalculated.

A zone's result is itself an input to further calculations. Chains like "zone A's total × tax rate" are built just by drawing a connector line.

It builds real forms, too

With horizontal/vertical ruled lines and A4/B5/A3 paper frames, you can lay out document-style forms such as estimates. Line up pieces inside the ruled columns, enclose the amount column with a zone for the subtotal, and wire a calculation piece for tax and the grand total — then print or export to PDF.

Documents save and load as JSON, so anything you build can be reused as a template.

CSV/TSV import and export are also supported (v0.9.0+). Feed CSV output from Excel or internal systems in as item rows, and hand the aggregated results back via TSV copy or BOM-prefixed CSV. Character encodings (UTF-8, UTF-16, Shift_JIS, EUC-JP) are detected automatically.

A few honest notes

This is still an early pre-release. For now it ships as a local-first app.

• Local-first Data is stored only in your browser's localStorage and JSON files. No account, no cloud, and nothing is transmitted externally
• Multi-user editing and AI analysis are future plans Collaborative editing/sharing and AI-assisted analysis of piece layouts and formulas are big themes for after the local version matures

That said, the core already works. Give it a try — and tell us how you'd like to use it.