Rows.com – Spreadsheet that supports external API integration and collaboration
rows.com
rows.com
It would be a killer product because most users are familiar with spreadsheets already. Many users end-up copying data from dashboards into spreadsheets (gsheet, excel, etc) so why not skipping the intermediaries and go straight to delivering a hybrid of dashboards and spreadsheets.
Lots of potential.
This is fully open source
Yes, NocoDB[1] allows to transform your own databases into Airtable like smart-spreadsheets. It is easy to get started - please try it out.
I played around a little and am missing actual spreadsheet functionality - like the ability to do calculations, or other manipulations that you could do on tabular data in Excel/Google Sheets (and presumably Rows). Am I missing something?
You can do calculations by creating a column with formula field.
First of all, Rows is a fantastic tool. They are really onto something, especially in how to work get structured data out of other systems into a spreadsheet and then work with that kind of data in the "spreadsheet way" that we've all been trained in. This is a pain point of current spreadsheets and one that Rows is addressing in a really nice way.
If you think about all the things that spreadsheets are used for - which is a lot - it still generally falls into one of three categories (https://medium.grid.is/the-3-types-of-spreadsheets-3d021356c...): 1. Numbers and calculations 2. Small databases 3. Business processes
What Rows does falls mostly into the realm of small databases and business processes. And while each has their own approach, I'd say that most other "next-gen spreadsheets" are also focusing on these (big and important) use-cases. Airtable (https://airtable.com/), Spreadsheet.com (https://spreadsheet.com/) and Smartsheet (https://smartsheet.com/) all play mainly in this area.
GRID is focusing on the numbers and calculations use-case, allowing people that have already built a model or pulled together numerical data in a spreadsheet to better explore, explain and converse about them.
I am not disagreeing with the languishing bit, only the hint that it had something to do with ownership.
With respect, if your BI tools look like excel, you need a better BI tool
However, using these still feels wrong for me. It seems to be simplifying some stuff but can get very complex quickly and hard to debug when you want to do something more involved. At that point, writing code gets much easier than managing ever expanding complexity of the No-Code solutions.
IMHO someone some day will crack it and programming for data processing will become a visual endeavour.
But the audience being non-tech people, the look is pretty fantastic.
From a technical perspective: Care to share how you do data integration (batch/ stream/ mix? All hosted hyperscaler or something like Airbyte)? How do you address what I would think are dynamic load peaks during business days?
Not everyone has online access 24x7: I don't have it where I live; I travel enough for work to not have it on travel about 50% of the time; I work with customers to whom we sell product, who Air-Gap their central operations for security reasons. Etc. Etc. I don't know what market was imagined but there are broad swaths that will never be accessible to you with the first design mistake of "it's convenient for US"!
I imagine the overlap will only increase. I take it as confirmation that these are good ideas to pursue.
Or not. The chief concern is that modern data protection laws would make all columns of these tables unreadable without specific sanction. You're not free to address any cell in any table, just a pre-cleared strict subset, which no longer allows you to take advantage of easy aggregation and filtering of data.
we wrote the story, project, prices of the rebrand in our blog if you're curious
a suggestion: key to us adopting this would be the migration story. I’d love if that was clearly presented on the website.
Standalone Python virtual server example https://github.com/finos/perspective/tree/master/examples/to...
JupyterLab demo on Binder https://mybinder.org/v2/gh/finos/perspective/master?urlpath=...
Also comparing product to Yahoo Pipes in the original post, how many prospective customers are gonna know what that is other than a handful of us around here? haha
AFAIK it’s a simple dropdown and you choose the frequency to run the script.
Having used it significantly, I found two main qualms that prevented me from investing more in the platform:
1. It is just JS syntax but the runtime and the “standard library” are completely different than node.js. For example there’s a weird UrlFetch class instead of xhr/fetch. It’s a never ending learning curve so much it feels like another language. Any async support is also non existent, that means no setTimeout, no Promise, no async/await (unless they added it recently with the move to ES6)
2. Due to 1, the library ecosystem is very limited. A library in GAS is just another GAS script that you import by referencing its ID (the long one in the URL).
Scripts can be public so you can import other people’s code. However no npm, no lodash and friends.
You can dev locally using clasp, so you can use git/npm/.., and package your code with webpack or something so it runs on GAS. However this only works for npm libs that do not depend on the usual JS environment and APIs. Lodash will work, anything network related won’t for example.
All in all Google App Script is more of a hassle than it’s worth so I only use it in specific cases, but I wish for a similarly accessible sheet+code environment that can also serve HTML, just with a better JS runtime.
Oh and don’t get me started on the development/deployment lifecycle.
Otherwise, do the heavy lifting somewhere else and use GAS as a very basic wrapper for your sheet.
One pattern that worked well for us in the past is to use Firebase functions (or Google Cloud Run) and leave the scripts to act as a dumb API to interact with the sheet.
Have used it in past to do exactly what you asked for.
"When disagreeing, please reply to the argument instead of calling names. 'That is idiotic; 1 + 1 is 2, not 3' can be shortened to '1 + 1 is 2, not 3."