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Comment by uptown | Hacker News Reader

I rolled my own version of this to manage the online menu for a restaurant. The restaurant manager updates a Google Spreadsheet with the current menu and item pricing. I pull that data and render either an HTML version for the web, or a PDF version for printing. Works very well.

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This is something we've been hearing from a lot of folks -- spreadsheet-driven websites are actually a really popular practice that we think should get more love and attention. I'd love to help you package that site you made for cloning and reuse on Cloudstitch so others can use it, too.

- Ted from Cloudstitch [ted@cloudstitch.io]

Have you thought of doing a spreadsheet-powered UI for desktop or internal web applications?

I know of one crazy guy who replaced an entire IT department back in 2000 that was dedicated to tweaking Java UIs. He built his own spreadsheet-powered UI builder and then had the business people add their own buttons/formulas. This worked especially well because it was a financial business.

Absolutely -- there's a whole interesting world of inside-the-firewall applications of this. Enterprise-style programming certainly has an important role to play, but we're pretty bullish on the role that lighter-weight solutions can provide as a compliment.

Isn't that VBA?

I did a Google Spreadsheet powered mail merge, printing N copies of a document with a different name and address subbed in, using an HTML page.

I know this election survey page was all backed by Google Spreadsheet, too: http://tritag.ca/election2014/ I'm not the author, but I understand it made it very easy to cut and paste in candidates' answers on the specific issues from a survey which was circulated by email.

I don't suppose you have the source for that up on github or anything do you? It sounds interesting.

I don't. I'll see if I can pull it together and get it online.

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