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Comment by tjchear | Hacker News Reader

So from talking to people I see a need to quickly turn a spreadsheet of information into something visually pleasing. SheetUI is my response to that need. You give it a Google Sheet URL, pick a template, and tap in the columns where you want them to show up. In return you get a visually pleasing and responsive web page that you can embed on your site, or link to in your newsletter or chat with a client.

Created with React and Material-UI, plus some spreadsheet fetching and parsing code.

Glad to answer any questions!

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This looks great! I made a while back a library[1] to do this, but of course you still have to code on top of it (which is what I wanted). Your project makes it very easy for everyone to get started and not only those who know how to code, props on launching it.

Are you using Node.js? Would love some feedback on my lib since it seems we are doing the same thing for different user types!

[1] https://github.com/franciscop/drive-db

I use Next.js, but the sheet is loaded client side :) My next iteration would switch to Cloud sheets API though.

That said, I wish I had stumbled upon your library when I first started out. It looks better designed than the one I initially used (which I promptly abandoned because it couldn't handle certain errors properly, and I decided to roll my own).

Thanks! I've been thinking of renaming it. Everyone who uses it loves it, but I have to first nag people into actually trying it and I think it's because it'd not very discoverable.

What names did you use to try to find it if you don't mind me asking?

I googled for javascript read google sheets. A few libraries showed up and I tried them. They weren't very polished so I wrote my own instead.

This looks great. Thanks for sharing.

Great idea! The video on the homepage is very useful; have you thought about linking to some examples?

Oh this is a good idea! Let me do that.

I added one so far (Product Catalog), you can click on it in the use case section. More to come :)

Nice! I would recommend making the link clearer: unless I knew it was there, I would have missed it.

Got it! I bolded the text. Also added one for Article Curation. Thank you for your advice and suggestion!

I missed it even after your changes until I read this thread. Maybe modifying the CSS is too much of an ask, but I personally think the link color should be a bit differentiated, the link should be underlined, or the link should be moved since I didn't expect a link there.

It's most certainly not too much of an ask. I'll make the changes!

What's wrong with the existing solutions:

https://sheetsu.com

https://sheety.co

https://www.sheet2site.com

https://steinhq.com

https://www.glideapps.com

Nothing wrong with them at all! They're each filling a different niche. Very well done too. I'm considering some of them as backend, actually.

My niche happens to be to quickly create a single visually pleasing web page from a sheet.

There's lots of platforms in that space and yet I am surprised that pretty much all of them are "read-only". I have yet to see one that allows writing to the sheet so users browsing the generated site can submit their own content or even use like counters or other dynamic functions that would update in the sheet.

I wrote an article about how to set up a platform like those mentioned + with write functionality (https://blog.usejournal.com/how-to-use-google-sheets-as-a-cm...) but I've always wondered if there would really be a market for such a thing. There clearly is anyway for read-only Google Sheet generated sites.

I think with the exception of Sheet2Site (and SheetUI, of course), the aforementioned platforms do provide write to sheet as well. Judging by the fact that they've been around for a while, I believe there is a market for platform with write functionality.

Your article is pretty well written! More people should look to using sheets before hand-rolling a heavy weight solution.

This looks really cool. I have a potential use case I'd consider using this for, but I don't want to make the sheet (or resulting page) public. Have you considered support for OAuth to retrieve private sheets?

Yes, definitely. I'm hard at work building Google Sheets API integration, so you wouldn't have to make your sheet public. DM me (@tjchear on Twitter) or email me to discuss your use case.

Try Awesome Table, it's been here for years for exactly that purpose and is one of the very top G Suite Marketplace apps: https://gsuite.google.com/marketplace/app/awesome_table/5608...

From reviews:

"..you have to pay £5,400 per year!"

"Even with the nonprofit pricing it would cost $900 per year."

"Pricing for singe user with one "app" is $60 per month. The "free" version only allows 100 "views" per month. Everytime you go to the page with the app and interface with the tools it counts as a "view". Everytime you refresh the page it is another "view"."

very nice... curious if you could embed it easily into another site or even wordpress page? I have had an HOA membership page that is backed by a Google Spreadsheet with some crap Sheets plugin that's always having trouble.

That is definitely possible. I can make some changes to generate an iframe embed code. Email or DM me on Twitter (@tjchear) if you want something customized :)

I have a personal website backed by a Google sheets page; however, it started not handing out proper CORS headers on the request, so it no longer works for me.

Have you run across this? How did you solve it? Thanks!

I have not run across this issue before. How are you accessing the sheets though? Cloud Sheets API, or the json-in-script endpoint?

From the File menu, choose "Publish to the web", and then choose ".csv" format. This gives you a URL that (up until recently) you could pull with either "curl" (etc.) or from a web page (e.g., an SPA). Now the SPA thing fails with a CORS error. Other people on the web have seen it too.

Thanks!

Massive kudos to the effort. The Gsheets API is notoriously hard to understand and work with. I see that you have put it to good use! Great work!

Thank you! I have yet to use the Cloud GSheets API; there's a much simpler approach, but it requires the user to publish their sheet on the web. I'm definitely working on GSheets API integration so users would not have to publish their sheet though.

Any comparison with Glide?

Ah yes. SheetUI turns a spreadsheet into a simple but pleasing web page, while Glide turns them into an app. That said, adding interactivity, crud capabilities, and just generally making a web app out of it is definitely part of my feature roadmap.

Not sure if you've heard of Sheet2Site[1] which I believe is a direct competitor.

[1] https://sheet2site.com/

Yeah definitely! They generate an entire site complete with beautiful template and search functionalities. Really amazing work. My niche is smaller in comparison - SheetUI generates a single webpage for each sheet. That said, generating a complete website/webapp is definitely part of my feature roadmap.

Why is React needed to display static HTML?

It's not?

But that being said I'm not sure this is static HTML either. You're going to need someway to parse and display that sheet data. Even if its server rendered as static HTML React isn't a bad way to go.

Sheet is retrieved and parsed client-side. React lets me iterate faster. I also use Next.js, so where possible I can do server-side rendering before sending the rendered bits down the wire.

This is great, it's really something that Google POs should look at

Do you have demos of current sites using this?

They are currently used as private use webpages for either private communities or to clients. I do not have a publicly viewable website I can show you, because frankly SheetUI is fairly new and no one has used it for that yet.

What would be your business model?

A subscription model on more template choices, read/write capabilities, and external integrations. Complete site/app generation from sheets is not out of the question :)

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