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Show HN: Sheetlabs – Turn your spreadsheets into APIs

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Re: Show HN: Sheetlabs – Turn your spreadsheets into APIs

#21

Post by jasoncrawford »

samcrawford wrote: post #16
gingerlime wrote: post #13

This is a really clever idea. So simple and almost-obvious, yet it's the first time I come across this. Genius. Particularly like the fact that REST APIs are pretty easy to start with providing GET access to resources, but get messy when you start doing POST, PUT, DELETE, PATCH etc. In this case, it's read-only by definition. That must make things so much easier. I can anticipate people asking for update access in fu…

Thanks! I too was surprised when I couldn't find anyone else that had done it. Noted RE pricing, just testing the water for today - consider this a HN special if you want to lock it in early ;)

A few related projects in the “spreadsheet as API/CMS” genre:

http://flatsheet.io/

http://data.brace.io/

http://cloudstitch.io/

Re: Show HN: Sheetlabs – Turn your spreadsheets into APIs

#22

Post by zavg »

notastartup wrote: post #9

This looks great. Now if you could only turn websites into a spreadsheet using http://scrape.ly and then turn it into an API using Sheetlabs, that would be awesome.

Try to use https://www.kimonolabs.com/, it seems that it is what you are looking for.

Re: Show HN: Sheetlabs – Turn your spreadsheets into APIs

#23

Post by samcrawford »

zavg wrote: post #22
notastartup wrote: post #9

This looks great. Now if you could only turn websites into a spreadsheet using http://scrape.ly and then turn it into an API using Sheetlabs, that would be awesome.

Try to use https://www.kimonolabs.com/ , it seems that it is what you are looking for.

import.io is very similar as well

Re: Show HN: Sheetlabs – Turn your spreadsheets into APIs

#26

Post by eykanal »

I'm guessing I'm simply not considering the target audience, but so far as I know the groups (people who communicate primarily via spreadsheets) and (people who know what an API is) have a fairly small overlap.

Maybe I'm just underestimating how widely used spreadsheets are for communicating programming information. I've never seen it, but hey, I've never seen a lot of things.

Re: Show HN: Sheetlabs – Turn your spreadsheets into APIs

#27

Post by j45 »

hpagey wrote: post #20
gingerlime wrote: post #13

This is a really clever idea. So simple and almost-obvious, yet it's the first time I come across this. Genius. Particularly like the fact that REST APIs are pretty easy to start with providing GET access to resources, but get messy when you start doing POST, PUT, DELETE, PATCH etc. In this case, it's read-only by definition. That must make things so much easier. I can anticipate people asking for update access in fu…

Actually there is a company out there called https://www.ragic.com/ . Not exactly same but similar.

This is a very neat tool, thanks for bringing it onto the radar.

Re: Show HN: Sheetlabs – Turn your spreadsheets into APIs

#28

Post by antjanus »

gingerlime wrote: post #13

This is a really clever idea. So simple and almost-obvious, yet it's the first time I come across this. Genius. Particularly like the fact that REST APIs are pretty easy to start with providing GET access to resources, but get messy when you start doing POST, PUT, DELETE, PATCH etc. In this case, it's read-only by definition. That must make things so much easier. I can anticipate people asking for update access in fu…

I gotta shameless plug this but I built a CMS that takes *.md files and a folder structure and spits it out as an API.

As a sidenote, I love these creatively easier ways to supply data to an API in order to use it quickly and update it quickly (just by re-uploading).

https://github.com/AntJanus/popstar-cms

Re: Show HN: Sheetlabs – Turn your spreadsheets into APIs

#29

Post by garysieling »

eykanal wrote: post #26

I'm guessing I'm simply not considering the target audience, but so far as I know the groups (people who communicate primarily via spreadsheets) and (people who know what an API is) have a fairly small overlap. Maybe I'm just underestimating how widely used spreadsheets are for communicating programming information. I've never seen it, but hey, I've never seen a lot of things.

Excel 2010 and up have the ability to read from web services that support Microsoft's OData protocol, and Microsoft is pushing some add-ons they built for Excel to turn it into a more robust front-end for business intelligence things.

So I don't think it's about knowing Excel and knowing what an API is as much as that you can train someone to paste a URL in and then they can build their own reports/worksheets that join in your data.

Re: Show HN: Sheetlabs – Turn your spreadsheets into APIs

#30

Post by jlouvel »

samcrawford wrote: post #16
gingerlime wrote: post #13

This is a really clever idea. So simple and almost-obvious, yet it's the first time I come across this. Genius. Particularly like the fact that REST APIs are pretty easy to start with providing GET access to resources, but get messy when you start doing POST, PUT, DELETE, PATCH etc. In this case, it's read-only by definition. That must make things so much easier. I can anticipate people asking for update access in fu…

Thanks! I too was surprised when I couldn't find anyone else that had done it. Noted RE pricing, just testing the water for today - consider this a HN special if you want to lock it in early ;)

There is also APISpark, a full stack PaaS for web APIs, that provides a "spreadsheet-to-web API" feature.

It works both in read and write mode. See tutorial: https://apispark.com/docs/tutorials/google-spreadsheet

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