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Ask HN: What are interesting ways to use apps like Airtable or Google Sheets?

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Ask HN: What are interesting ways to use apps like Airtable or Google Sheets?

#1
Apps and tools like Airtable and Google Sheets are pretty impressive for their capabilities, but I also feel a little overwhelmed by the almost infinite ways to use them.

Do you use them (or know of anyone using them) for anything interesting or novel?

Re: Ask HN: What are interesting ways to use apps like Airtable or Google Sheets?

#4
> but I also feel a little overwhelmed by the almost infinite ways to use them.

Approach it from the opposite side - do you have a use case or a problem that might be solved with either of these tools? Then try them out and see if they help. If you dont, then who cares about the complicated things that can be done with Airtable or Sheets, none of that is relevant to you.

Re: Ask HN: What are interesting ways to use apps like Airtable or Google Sheets?

#5
You can use it to curate listicles.

Imagine your marketing department needs to create a list of websites that have run their PR campaign. They can keep that data in Airtable or Google Sheets.

The developer then displays on a simple webpage in a card like https://nomadlist.com

There are sites like https://sheet2site.com & https://table2site.com that automate this feature.

You can also create custom apps with it. https://pory.io/ automates it.

Re: Ask HN: What are interesting ways to use apps like Airtable or Google Sheets?

#6
(Full transparency: current Airtable employee) One of the first things I stumbled on when looking at Airtable (prior to joining) was their gallery of publicly available examples called Universe: https://www.airtable.com/universe

These aren't templates in the strict sense. Rather hundreds of real examples of things other people have built with Airtable and are now not only viewable, but free for anyone to copy and use. Scrolling through these really gave me an idea of just how versatile Airtable itself could be and also helped me get a better sense of where I might start with the product for the business use case I was looking to solve.

Re: Ask HN: What are interesting ways to use apps like Airtable or Google Sheets?

#8
You can build UI or frontend for admin panel, dashboards, custom tools using low-code platform like DronaHQ and easily integrate with Airtable or Googlesheets as database.

https://dronahq.com/admin-panel-spreadsheet-to-app/ or refer https://www.dronahq.com/how-to-build-an-admin-panel-and-dash...

Re: Ask HN: What are interesting ways to use apps like Airtable or Google Sheets?

#9
You'll find they're probably not the best tools for a lot of the 'infinite ways' you expect. But they're great for simple data entry and basic calculations.

The novel ways I've seen them used are around the development of Apps / internal tools, using low code builders like Budibase

Re: Ask HN: What are interesting ways to use apps like Airtable or Google Sheets?

#10
post #9

You'll find they're probably not the best tools for a lot of the 'infinite ways' you expect. But they're great for simple data entry and basic calculations. The novel ways I've seen them used are around the development of Apps / internal tools, using low code builders like Budibase

For ref: https://github.com/Budibase/budibase