Most notes apps are a very good place to put text and a very bad place to keep it true. The numbers you pasted in March are still the numbers from March; the task you wrote down is a sentence, not a commitment anything tracks. LumenNotes closes both gaps in the same page: a spreadsheet you drop in stays connected to the file, and a line you hand to an agent gets done while you carry on writing.
A spreadsheet that stays a spreadsheet
Type /data in a page and pick a workbook, a sheet and a first view. Nothing is copied. The block references the file, so when the sheet changes the page changes with it — and when you edit a cell in the note, the value is written back to the sheet.
- Table — 18 rows, filtered to Q3, grouped by Stage
- Board — three lanes; dragging a card between them changes Stage in the sheet
- Chart — open work by owner, one measure, one colour
- Also: cards · gallery · list · stats · calendar · timeline · pivot
- Point it at a sheet.
/datalists the workbooks you already have. Pick one, pick a sheet, pick a first view. - Read it ten ways. Table, board, chart, cards, gallery, list, stats, calendar, timeline, pivot — filtered and grouped without touching the file.
- Edit from the note. Change a cell, tick a box, drag a card between lanes. It goes back to the sheet, and LumenSheets opens the whole thing whenever you want it.
Hand one line over, keep writing
Type @ on any to-do — or on any row of a data board — and pick a role. The agent runs in the background while you carry on, and writes what it found into its own card. There are six roles, and only one of them can start others.
| Role | What it does |
|---|---|
| Coordinator | Breaks the work into tasks, runs them in parallel, writes up what came back |
| Task | Takes one job end to end, with everything the assistant can reach |
| Researcher | Finds out — the open web and your own library — and reports back with sources |
| Analyst | Works the numbers: reads your spreadsheets and builds the boards that show them |
| Writer | Drafts the thing — a section, a page, a document in another editor |
| Reviewer | Checks the work against the page and says what is wrong with it. Changes nothing |
- Researcher · Competitor pricing — searching the web, 4 results, step 3 of 10 · 41s
- Analyst · Churn by plan — finished: built 1 data board · 12 steps · 1m 42s
- Writer · Launch note draft — stopped part-way: “I stopped before the FAQ because the tier names were still being changed”
The page around all of it
- Pages nest eight levels deep, and a branch can be moved under another page rather than only dragged within its own list.
[[Wiki-links]]connect pages, and the page you linked to shows what points at it, carrying the sentence the link appeared in.- A ticked box is the same commitment everywhere it appears — tasks are tracked by identity, not by the line they sit on, so reordering a page does not scramble what is done.
- Columns, toggles and equations are ordinary blocks, not a plugin.
- Recording is free. Transcribing a saved recording uploads that audio to a managed service and needs a paid plan; the live transcript while you record comes from your own system.
Where all this runs
The notebook is encrypted at rest on your own machine and there is no server copy of the body text. That is also why the agents above run here rather than in the cloud: there would be nothing in the cloud for them to read. Quitting stops them, and anything that has not started yet waits for you.
Questions people ask about notes
Does a data board copy my spreadsheet into the note?
No. The block references the file and caches a bounded snapshot for drawing. Edits you make in the note are written back to the sheet, and opening the workbook in LumenSheets shows the same values.
What happens to a background agent if I close the laptop?
It stops. The work runs on this machine, so quitting ends anything in flight and anything still queued simply waits for you. A run that stopped part-way says so in its own card, and that card is part of the page.
Can an agent overwrite what I am typing?
No. A running agent never writes into the page — its output accumulates in its own card and is committed once, when it finishes. That is a property of the write path, not a setting.
Is the notebook searchable from the rest of the app?
Yes. Notes are indexed alongside your documents, so one search box covers both. See finding your own past for what that search can and cannot do offline.
Do I need a paid plan?
No. Every editor is free with no trial timer and no watermark, and a free account includes Lumen Core plus a monthly AI allowance. Transcription is the one thing on this page that needs Plus or above.
