
Building apps on top of Google Sheets - dvdhsu
https://tryretool.com/blog/google-sheets/
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maddyboo
This was interesting enough for me to sign up and try going through the
onboarding experience.

The tutorial tooltip modals seem a bit janky - selected/hovered objects on the
canvas float over top of them [1] so you can't read the instructions on what
to do next. On closer inspection, this seems to be intentional, and you can
drag the modals around, but this wasn't very intuitive. Also, the panel
resizing hover effect shows up when hovering the mouse inside the modal [2],
which is a bit odd.

Otherwise, this is a cool tool which I may use for making simple apps for non-
technical people to use.

1: [https://i.imgur.com/bl7Be21.png](https://i.imgur.com/bl7Be21.png)

2: [https://i.imgur.com/ZSDKqjd.png](https://i.imgur.com/ZSDKqjd.png)

~~~
repsilat
> _simple apps for non-technical people_

To be honest I'll probably use Retool for my next programming project for

\- A "migrations dashboard",

\- User management,

\- All kinds of other annoying ad-hoc data tasks that don't (or "don't yet")
merit code in my git repo.

I think it's really "ActiveAdmin but better, and for every platform."

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andrethegiant
If you're interested in this, you'd definitely be interested in Airtable[1].
It's like Trello meets spreadsheets + API. Also their documentation is the
best I've ever seen — personalized, ability to view code samples in multiple
programming languages, and straightforward.

[1] [https://airtable.com](https://airtable.com)

~~~
abalone
One thing google sheets has going for it is a limit of 2M cells per workbook.
Airtable’s is surprisingly small. Free plan is just 1,200 records.

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bnj
My school has been looking for good options to build a tool that will let
students login, check the accuracy of their transcripts, and then file any
issues. Retool looks promising but the pricing structure is per user.

Is anyone able to point to platforms that might work well for building an
interface that a couple thousand students could log into?

~~~
discordance
[https://anvil.works](https://anvil.works)

~~~
meredydd
Thanks for mentioning us! Yes, this is the sort of thing our customers use
Anvil for all the time (including several schools). (And since you ask, our
pricing is per developer.)

My email is in my profile, or you can just check out the demo/tutorial videos
at [https://anvil.works/learn](https://anvil.works/learn)

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pbreit
This certainly looks interesting.

One of my favorite seemingly overlooked gSheet features is the ability to
attach JavaScript including a UrlFetch() capability.

This enables fairly easy, fairly powerful data manipulation by looping through
a set of rows and making RESTful API calls against each.

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smithclay
I've recently seen some compelling and simple internal tools that were built
on top of Google Sheets in unexpected industries far away from SF.

An online spreadsheet + UI + optional external API calls seems perfect for
fast development of a large number of straightforward internal-facing apps,
including lots of things that are currently done on paper.

For those limited and simple use cases Google Sheets is a far more usable
"serverless" platform than a lot of stuff in the hype cycle right now.

~~~
enjo
I've been doing quite a bit of this recently. That Javascript interface with
easy access to.. everything.. is indeed really powerful. For instance we've
instrumented our project management in Google sheets (pulling data from JIRA)
and built in a forecasting model which I use to keep our rather large team
staffed.

It's great stuff.

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parsadotsh
I did something similar on Office 365 with Excel and Microsoft Flow to make a
bookkeeping App for my dad.

I used the Workflow app on IOS to make the queries and send them to Flow to be
added to the excel file. The whole thing felt very duct-tapey but it was way
easier to pull off and enjoyable than a normal webapp+database. The UI is then
just some buttons in the IOS Widgets menu.

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qwerty456127
If Google would introduce something like a free online version of SQLite that
would be possible to query from a static site on GitHub pages - that would be
cool...

~~~
nivertech
There is a built-in =QUERY function, which let you to run SQL queries on a
spreadsheets' content.

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romed
The example use case of sending an email for every lead in your sheet is
already handled in Sheets itself. You can send email with Apps Script and have
been able to do so for a decade.

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Bjartr
Note there are limitations in Google sheets on number of rows and script
execution time.

