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Comment by manveerc | Hacker News Reader

Congratulations on the launch, looks great. Do you also support Google Sheets? We are building our dashboards in Sheets right now and that’s a big pain. Looking for alternatives.

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Gemini has some support for Google Sheets built-in. It's under Labs now but worth a comparison: https://support.google.com/docs/answer/14218565?hl=en

I have tried it, maybe I am bad at using it but my experience has been pretty bad with it

We[0] support Google Sheets as a source out of the box[1]. We have connectors for 500 sources and can grab data from anything with an API.

Definite spins up a datalake for you and pipelines to get data into the lake. We also have BI (semantic layer + dashboards) and an AI agent that will build reports for you. Let me know if you need a hand getting set up! I'm mike@definite.app.

0 - https://www.definite.app/

1 - https://docs.definite.app/extractors/gsheetquerying

Thanks for checking it out! We're focusing on SQL databases (PostgreSQL/MYSQL) as that's where many SaaS companies are storing their customer-facing app data.

Are your dashboards for an internal use-case? If so, there are some excellent AI-Native BI tools out there that have connections for Google Sheets.

No this is for customer facing dashboards. We are operating in an agency model, sheets is great because of the flexibility. But for all those traditional time series graphs it is a bit cumbersome when data is across multiple sheets and tabs

Ah, that makes sense. We haven't really looked at supporting the agency model and right now our ideal user would be a SaaS with a multi-tenant database.

Looks like you got some good suggestions for how to solve your particular problem with sheets in the other comments but feel free to check us out again if you ever move to something like Postgres/MySQL.

If you want to use Google Sheets as 'live' SQL data sources consider to use a BI tool that has a DuckDB connector. DuckDB has gsheets extension (https://duckdb.org/community_extensions/extensions/gsheets.h...) and it works like a charm.

In particular, Metabase and Superset can be deployed with DuckDB support. You mentioned customer facing dashboards, note that Metabase embedded is not free. Just to say, our SeekTable also has DuckDB connector (and can be used as an embedded BI).

oof, at least use looker studio.

Yes that’s the immediate plan

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