Show HN: How Monocle uses Discord for live chat in spreadsheets

monoclemoney.com

9 points·tetrisgm··4 comments

I'm the guy who wrote the article. Let me know if you have any questions about migrating from Slack to Discord, or about how we've been using widgets to extend Google Sheets!

What is Monocle? What are "Monocle Sheets"? Where does a chatroom fit in a personal finance spreadsheet?

Sorry if it wasn't clear in the article! - You can get to our homepage from the header that says Monocle - I added a link at the very start of the article

In short, Monocle is a service that we're building to push your bank transactions to GSuite. Part of it is you get a nice spreadsheet that acts as a dashboard. You can see an example on http://bit.ly/monocledemo

The chatroom is used for live support. Honestly, I think it's easy for someone to get overwhelmed in Sheets and have a bunch of open questions. In that context, I think that live chat is superior as a means to help someone, than say sending support tickets or such. So I wanted a solution that would let people chat with us from within the spreadsheet.

Being based on Google Sheets, we were lucky to be in web. So I looked for ways to embed something in Sheets, which led me to two options: Sidebars and Dialogs. They allow embedding, which works well with Discord. So we decided to use this solution to provide people with live support.

Thanks. Now that I understand where you're coming from the idea makes a lot of sense and the article may be useful (I started reading it before, but stopped because I needed a background, which I now have).

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