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I recently built a little trivia game for my friend, and not wanting to spin up a database, I used Google Sheets as the backend.

My friend can edit the sheet at will, and the app pulls the data in via JavaScript. Google already sets the right CORS headers.

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I tried this a few years ago and ran into some speed issues ( http://www.mooreds.com/wordpress/archives/1359 ). Is that something you've encountered?

There are a few interesting hacks you can do, the calls are slow to an individual cell (I think like 50-100ms). If you need arbitrary cells, you can use a sheet formula to put the desired result in a single cell.

For example I had a sheet that had hundreds of columns that the headers would change over time - instead of reading through each cell, I just used CONCATENATE(), read a single cell then split it in my program after pulling it.

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