Building apps on top of Google Sheets | Hacker News Reader

Building apps on top of Google Sheets

tryretool.com

87 pointsdvdhsu20 comments

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

2: https://i.imgur.com/ZSDKqjd.png

> 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."

Oh no! We shipped a bug earlier today which messed up the z-index of the onboarding modal. Fixing now...

Edit: fixed — thanks!

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

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.

I like airtable and similar products but fear that the data is pretty locked into their format. Am I wrong about that?

I tried using Airtable for a project recently, to collect data from customers, but found that it was unworkable due to having little to no field validation. Google Sheets/Forms actually has reasonable field validation for data input, but Airtable seems stubbornly resistant to adding the same.

https://community.airtable.com/t/advanced-rules-for-data-inp...

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?

https://anvil.works

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

hey, sounds like a really interesting use-case for Retool. I’m sure we can figure something out for you guys, let’s talk - taimur@retool.in (couldn’t find your email anywhere haha)

I'd think the concerns in such a system would be the authentication of students, and having their transcripts online and secured. You likely already have some of that in place, so extending existing systems might make more sense than pushing confidential student data into a new platform.

Do you have the software support in your organization to look into something like that? If not, I may be willing to help out - I'm leaving the corporate world in a week or two, thinking about starting a non-profit software organization to solve problems like this for other non-profits, education, etc. And I would need some initial projects to work on to get that idea rolling. My email is in my profile if that sounds interesting.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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...

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

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.

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

Reply on news.ycombinator.com