Charts That Sit Beside Your Numbers Instead of a Side Panel

Insert a chart in most spreadsheet tools and you get a floating object — draggable, resizable, and disconnected from the cells it's summarizing. Reading it usually means scrolling away from your source numbers, or shrinking your view to fit both on screen at once. That's a strange default for something whose whole purpose is helping you read the data faster.

Piskes Sheets draws charts directly on the grid, anchored to the range they represent, sitting beside your numbers rather than in a separate panel you navigate to. The mechanism is frontend/apps/drive/src/lib/office/sheet-chart-anchor.ts, which uses Univer's drawing layer — specifically addFloatDomToRange, tying a chart to a range, a layer, and a DOM layout — and it accepts a real React component as the thing being drawn, not a static image or a canvas-only rendering.

The practical difference shows up in the reading experience, not the building experience. When a chart lives right next to the table it summarizes, you can look at both at once — glance at the trend line, glance at the raw numbers behind it, without losing your place scrolling between a data view and a chart view. That matters more than it sounds like it should, especially in a model or report someone's actively reviewing line by line: the chart is a companion to the data, not a separate destination.

This is a small design decision with an outsized effect on how a sheet actually gets used day to day. Most complaints in spreadsheet-tool reviews about charts aren't about rendering quality or chart types — they're about friction getting to and from the chart while you're working. Anchoring the chart to the grid removes that friction by removing the separate location entirely.