161–170 of 171 posts
Can you share the tool that transforms the spreadsheet into a realtime API? Sounds creative and interesting!
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Can you elaborate? I understand the reasoning "we need to grow no matter the cost, will deal with problems when they arise", but deliberately sabotaging yourself doesn't sound reasonable.
For a number of reasons (some of them actually fairly substantial), spreadsheets are the only end-user programming tool that caught on and endured, so users will often choose them. It’s not even that they won’t need to find/hire/allocate programmers, it’s that using them doesn’t seem like a big deal at all. Of course, just because you told yourself you aren’t doing a software project doesn’t mean you’re not prone to…
I don't understand why it doesn't seem like a big deal, knowing the limitations of spreadsheets. The spreadsheet experts have to know that it will be spaghetti in a decade, right?
I still think the solution for unifying those is to use a database as a backend, with the spreadsheets merely being a frontend for that backend. It does require the people to come somewhat closer to the software, though. I don't know that software can reasonably work with the ill-defined schema of spreadsheets.
Funny story. Before pivoting my startup to Loom, we were a user testing company named Opentest. Instead of spinning up a DB and creating a dashboard for my co-founders to look at who requested certain user tests, I just dumped everything into a Google Sheet. It was so good. No downtime. Open access. Only 3 people looking/editing, so no conflict. Didn't have to deal with database upgrades or maintenance. I often think…
Agreed. Google Sheets is a great scrappy option for a startup / small company. I've used it for a lot of system data that needs to be modified by a few people at most. With a little bit of careful code and caching (I like validating and syncing to S3) you can easily use it as a crud frontend for important system data. It also can make great adhoc dashboards - plug into APIs (even private ones if you add in custom Goo…
I used to use a Google Sheet to drive a restaurant website's menu page. It was perfect. The restaurant could update the spreadsheet whenever something changed, and it'd instantly be reflected on the web. If they ever messed something up, they could just revert.
A couple of weeks ago, I set up this exact thing for a restaurant. Simple and free. I had app script build the site on updates. So they could edit it any time, it would trigger a rebuild, and redeploy as a static site.
I'm surprised no one's posted Spread API yet: https://spreadapi.roombelt.com/ It's a free Google Sheets / Apps Script you just paste to your sheet, and it turns the sheet into a full CRUD. It's kind of rate limited though but completely free! Edit: I've thought about creating a company around Sheets before, and the problem is that once you get to the "willing to pay" stage, you also kind of outgrow Sheets. I'd rather…
Looks neat! Seems very limited though.. like you can't even insert multiple lines in one request?
See https://github.com/ziolko/spreadapi/blob/master/spread-api.j...
As an example:
curl -L \
--data '[{ "method": "POST", "sheet": "Sheet1", "payload": { "username": "John", "age": 25 } }, { "method": "GET", "sheet": "Sheet1" }]' \
"https://script.google.com/macros/s/$APP_ID/exec"
https://github.com/benborgers/opensheet#readme Is the best and simplest tool for turning Google Sheets accessible quickly.