Making tiny, no-code webapps out of spreadsheets is a weirdly fulfilling hobby
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Love this. Reminds me of using google forms, google sites, and sheets together to make a mobile app to manage my dumpster company before selling it. It worked wonderfully and was absolutely free compared to large $$$ specific use software that was available at the time. Took an evening to set up. Each user in my google suite had separate access. Ran flawlessly for 5-6 years before selling the company to another business. Not sure what they went to after that.
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This looks like the perfect solution to my gym workout tracking excel spreadsheet that I struggle with using on a small screen.
My flu-ridden self thanks you for the amazing timing!
My flu-ridden self thanks you for the amazing timing!
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I have done this to create a series of "collection" apps for myself. One for boardgames, another for retro video games and another for manga graphic novels. Nothing super fancy but nice as a quick reference when I am at a shop and wonder if this is something I already own. I am a programmer for a living but just wanted something quick and dirty for my hobbies without spending a lot of time on my collections.
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For the life of me, I can’t work out how this isn’t yet another case of those who can’t remember the existence of databases being condemned to trying to recreate one out of a spreadsheet.
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You could export this data as a CSV, build a DB schema for it, import it in, and use a different front end app and get the same results. But I'm not sure what that would gain. Given the small amount of data, it's not going to improve performance noticeably.
A rule of thumb I've developed over the years is "never use a database where a flat file will do," because databases add an extra layer of complication to backups, maintenance, and moving stuff from system to system. Once something is in a database, it's in a proprietary format.
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google sheets can be exported to libreoffice.Scratching your own itch is an interesting thing. It's what's driven an awful lot of innovation in the computer industry - and we rightfully laud it.
But at the same time that doesn't mean everyone wants to create something that ends up being a full time job and then becomes a company that employs people. Sometimes, we just want to make our lives just a bit easier, and we're done.
The only downsides to this kind of solution is the dependency on an external supplier. In this case, Glide. For me, a long time ago it was Palm for hardware and ThinkDB(?) for software. When the platform dies, so does your solution.
Fortunately Google Sheets seems like it'll be around for a while, so that just leaves Glide. It seems you've already looked at some of the other low-code solutions, so you can always move away.
I guess what I'm trying to say here is that the great thing about saving time is that there's now more time available in which to play with saving more time... Oh, wait. Well, as long as we enjoy it, eh?
The glide app reading libreoffice would be stable solution...
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Username seems so fitting for thisHey Kevin, could you embed this spreadsheet-powered web app into a Word document for me? I want to put it into my spreadsheet of neat things (that I keep in a PDF that I access through another Word document that has a spreadsheet in it).
Well done.
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The base for it was the below which is admittedly a little worrying to a ToS naive reader like myself. The "materials contained on the Services" is not particularly narrow, and sounds like it may apply to any material you upload to the Services.
That said, as multiple posters noted, if you scroll down a bit further it is explicitly clarified that uploads onto the service are NOT claimed by Glide!
In any case, I'm off to explore this. I've started down the rabbit hole before of using React Native for personal hobby projects like this, and Glide seems a lot more accessible for rapidly assessing if a list based project is actually worth my time.
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I created an account just to comment on this article to say: So helpful, Kevin!! Thank you. I am trying to catalog my household so we can find things easily and right now I use a rudimentary method… just a list in a Google doc shared with my husband. I can do so much better!! lol. Can you please do a story ranking recipe import apps?? Thank you.
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Interesting - I had a quick look around some of the other providers of things like this (looks like JotForm has one, there's Microsoft Power apps and some others in addition to what's mentioned in the article). Does anybody know off-hand which of these services would be better suited to personal projects where you want to have multiple users on them?
It looks like the dividing line between what you can do for free and what costs Enterprise licensing money is usually moving up to multiple users, but I'm wondering if there's one of these that has a good tier for hobbyists who just want to make something for their friends to use without it suddenly costing hundreds and hundreds a year? (I can think of a few things I'd like to make related to some hobbies I share with friends, for example)
It looks like the dividing line between what you can do for free and what costs Enterprise licensing money is usually moving up to multiple users, but I'm wondering if there's one of these that has a good tier for hobbyists who just want to make something for their friends to use without it suddenly costing hundreds and hundreds a year? (I can think of a few things I'd like to make related to some hobbies I share with friends, for example)
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Thank you! What an amazing little project. I’m sure I’ll find tons of uses for it.
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I've had good luck with AppSmith. I haven't tried Glide, but it doesn't seem like it's open source at all, so for personal projects Glide would be a no-go.
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Ars writers using Buzzfeed-style, clickbait headlines? No, thanks.
(Yeah, I know. You "can't stop!")
(Yeah, I know. You "can't stop!")
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For those who are worried about lock-in, vendor death, or who just want to self-host all the things, or prefer to use FOSS, BaseRow might offer similar joy. If you don't want to self-host, their free hosted plan is a bit more generous than Grid, and if you need to move to a paid plan it's $10/mo.
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keltorsori
Ars Centurion
I wish this had existed about 10 years ago...
This story is an example of how we sometimes lie to ourselves, "this tool is not ideal, but it'll be OK for this ONE thing, no one will even know and I'll definitely create a real app once it moves past this ONE thing...."
(just to get ahead of nattering nabobs of negativity, I am a FERPA stickler, so nothing you are about to read had PII or otherwise would be in the universe anything FERPA violating)
Thanks to Sheets ability for SQL queries for building complex actions I unintentionally ended up over a year or two building a couple of Sheets that were VERY poor apps that I used for completely automating school and (tiny) urban district formative and summative assessment management (and eventually a ton of other tedium).
You try to ensure no testing room has more than 20 students in it all taking the same subject area assessments (or 3-5 or needing read-aloud or braille or you name it depending on IEP or 504 accommodations and on and on and on, oh and a student population that is liable to change by 3-7% each quarter...).
A process that took a staff of 3 usually a week of extended days to organize, a week to score, and usually a nightmare during the 1 or 2 assessment days to organize the physical exams and proctors was turned into a couple of hours of setup. Even that was mostly me doing a fresh SIS import of relevant info and doing some classroom visits while I waiting on all the sub-sheets to update. From there my completely least best tool for the job would (eventually) automatically generate room rosters based on exam, accommodations, proctor, etc. Thanks to some janky mail merge I cobbled together I could run a script from the Sheets menu that would even output a PDF of each room's pre-slugged exam books/scantrons ready to print and be done with the dumb parts.
Was it a complete nightmare for any human but me to even look at any of the nested, nested, nested SQL commands that pulled from a half-dozen different sheets in a single workbook and grind away for 10 minutes? Of course! Did I get to a point where I started writing a proper app in python that I never half finished? Yep! Did I keep tweaking and expanding the absolute monster of a Google Sheet that after 5 or so years and a move to an alternative school with a new set of additional needs that I had automated all the tedious organization and data parts of my job so I could focus on working with teachers and students on actual teaching and learning? Yep! But oh, the poor soul who I trained to take my job when I left... I had done a good job of documenting, wrote detailed comments on every SQL query, how-to manual with step-by-step screenshots, etc, but it was still obviously an app with a customer base of me.
This story is an example of how we sometimes lie to ourselves, "this tool is not ideal, but it'll be OK for this ONE thing, no one will even know and I'll definitely create a real app once it moves past this ONE thing...."
(just to get ahead of nattering nabobs of negativity, I am a FERPA stickler, so nothing you are about to read had PII or otherwise would be in the universe anything FERPA violating)
Thanks to Sheets ability for SQL queries for building complex actions I unintentionally ended up over a year or two building a couple of Sheets that were VERY poor apps that I used for completely automating school and (tiny) urban district formative and summative assessment management (and eventually a ton of other tedium).
You try to ensure no testing room has more than 20 students in it all taking the same subject area assessments (or 3-5 or needing read-aloud or braille or you name it depending on IEP or 504 accommodations and on and on and on, oh and a student population that is liable to change by 3-7% each quarter...).
A process that took a staff of 3 usually a week of extended days to organize, a week to score, and usually a nightmare during the 1 or 2 assessment days to organize the physical exams and proctors was turned into a couple of hours of setup. Even that was mostly me doing a fresh SIS import of relevant info and doing some classroom visits while I waiting on all the sub-sheets to update. From there my completely least best tool for the job would (eventually) automatically generate room rosters based on exam, accommodations, proctor, etc. Thanks to some janky mail merge I cobbled together I could run a script from the Sheets menu that would even output a PDF of each room's pre-slugged exam books/scantrons ready to print and be done with the dumb parts.
Was it a complete nightmare for any human but me to even look at any of the nested, nested, nested SQL commands that pulled from a half-dozen different sheets in a single workbook and grind away for 10 minutes? Of course! Did I get to a point where I started writing a proper app in python that I never half finished? Yep! Did I keep tweaking and expanding the absolute monster of a Google Sheet that after 5 or so years and a move to an alternative school with a new set of additional needs that I had automated all the tedious organization and data parts of my job so I could focus on working with teachers and students on actual teaching and learning? Yep! But oh, the poor soul who I trained to take my job when I left... I had done a good job of documenting, wrote detailed comments on every SQL query, how-to manual with step-by-step screenshots, etc, but it was still obviously an app with a customer base of me.
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This sounds almost like a description for a advent of code problem. I wonder if he takes submissions. That way you can have reference implementations in all languages as well as a lot of online discussion and analysis of the problem. ;-)
Edit: and a note, LLMs are usually pretty good at SQL too. It's often possible to have them construct or refactor complex SQL queries into simpler ones.
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That’s a deep rabbit hole to go down, and I’m sure lots of people will have strong opinions on which apps are best. The two that I’ve tried and liked are Paprika and AnyList; ended up using the latter, as the ui was more to my taste.
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I can see a lot of database people here, so this might be an appropriate place to ask. I volunteer at a non-profit that supports a particular campaign for new legislation (not in the USA).
We have about 5,000 members across the nation, and about 700 politicians across various regional legislatures. So we're looking for a cheap / no-code db / spreadsheet concept that can handle this:
Given the address of each member and the area each politician represents, we'd like to be able to see who lives under which politician and send the members living in that area an email (or make meet-up arrangements).
Of course every year, some members will move, so they need to be able to update their own addresses. And every election some of the politicians change, so that would be a regular update task for us.
For bonus points, we'd like the members to be able to upload their correspondence with the politician regarding the campaign, or summaries of the meetings they had with the politician. Or selfies / videos of them with the politician.
Any suggestions on what would be an easy-to-handle tool for this job? AirTables? Glide? Excel? We have MS Office365 but not particularly skilled in using it.
(We would have about 4-5 people touching the app admin, extracting data, using it to contact groups and feeding into the rest of the legislation campaign.)
We have about 5,000 members across the nation, and about 700 politicians across various regional legislatures. So we're looking for a cheap / no-code db / spreadsheet concept that can handle this:
Given the address of each member and the area each politician represents, we'd like to be able to see who lives under which politician and send the members living in that area an email (or make meet-up arrangements).
Of course every year, some members will move, so they need to be able to update their own addresses. And every election some of the politicians change, so that would be a regular update task for us.
For bonus points, we'd like the members to be able to upload their correspondence with the politician regarding the campaign, or summaries of the meetings they had with the politician. Or selfies / videos of them with the politician.
Any suggestions on what would be an easy-to-handle tool for this job? AirTables? Glide? Excel? We have MS Office365 but not particularly skilled in using it.
(We would have about 4-5 people touching the app admin, extracting data, using it to contact groups and feeding into the rest of the legislation campaign.)
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Make an app just to figure out where to eat: many software engineers would relate! Most would however struggle to understand why going to such lengths to avoid writing an app. Glide reminds me of Access, a tool I only recall in my nightmares.
That said, this article emphasizes two important facts of life: (1) most apps are just fancy interfaces to write stuff in a DB (2) spreadsheet software sucks on mobile.
That said, this article emphasizes two important facts of life: (1) most apps are just fancy interfaces to write stuff in a DB (2) spreadsheet software sucks on mobile.
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Feels like the next step to make computers more useful to normal
folks is more low-code interfaces to databases, as well as explaining why to use a database rather than a spreadsheet.
Is it true to say that the main problem with Access or Filemaker is that they don't work well in terms of best practice for structure and scalability etc?
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I used Access back in the day, and the main problem with it was the default shared-file database. It was OK up to about 4 or 5 concurrent users, then it would start having locking problems, which meant that it would fail right around the time the application became important to the company.
If you back Access with a proper SQL database it's reasonably robust. Obviously Microsoft would like that to be MSSQL server so they can sell you CALs, but anything that has ODBC drivers will work. I've used MySQL with Access before, for example.
The skills needed to build an Access app and the skills needed to set up a proper database server are completely separate, which is probably why it got a bad name.
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Yes, thank you for mentioning TiddlyWiki! I was thinking about it too, as this is the perfect use case for it.
You could even make an web app that works on mobile and that can be added to the home screen, though you might want to customize it to make it more "app-like", such by setting up a menubar using the menubar plugin, as done on the TiddlyWiki homepage, and changing the favicon, by creating a $:/favicon.ico tiddler. Sorting restaurants could be done using filters and the list-links macro or something a little more advanced like the list widget. Just giving a few more ideas…
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I guess the main sin of Access (or Filemaker) is that too many people used it as enterprise database. In my first internship I was asked to maintain a school student DB in Access: this gave me PTSD.
It was fine (and fun) as a personal tool.
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Answering my own question: a lot, but not as much as I thought. I've been hovering over SwiftUI for a while. It's not drag-and-drop like this by any means, but it is easier to get going than I expected. I made a simple CRUD app in Glide in about an hour. I made the same app with SwiftUI, following tutorials and with help from ChatGPT, over the weekend.
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Well that's disappointing. I'll see who else may be there. Part of the problem is that Google has promoted DoorDash, Uber, et al so heavily that the local folks aren't findable.
Thanks for making the effort!
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I've been very happy with Recipe Keeper, though it doesn't have any discovery functionality.
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Because there's no reason to use a database for a use case like this? Databases are better than spreadsheets when scalability matters or you need to manage complex data relationships, but it does not seem like the use case here demands that or have the likelihood of scaling to the point where it would. You are coming up with a solution asking for a problem rather than the other way round.
Now think of the benefits of spreadsheets. It's easy to use. Even as a programmer I would much much rather deal with a spreadsheet that I can just directly edit in Google Spreadsheet or any compatible programs. The app is serving as a light front-end but the backend remains directly accessible to you and you can do any common spreadsheet operations on them as well. It's faster to set up, easier to teach, trivial to back up, and just kind of works. I would even argue using a spreadsheet is more powerful in a way because how you can manipulate the data using a rich interactive application instead of having to go through SQL queries or the limited app interface.
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