10 ms·

Show HN: SheetUI – Turn Google Sheets into Web Pages

425 points by tjchear 6y ago

tjchear 6y ago
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!
- wiremine 6y ago
  Great idea! The video on the homepage is very useful; have you thought about linking to some examples?
  - tjchear 6y ago
    Oh this is a good idea! Let me do that.
    - deleted 6y ago
      [deleted]
  - tjchear 6y ago
    I added one so far (Product Catalog), you can click on it in the use case section. More to come :)
    - wiremine 6y ago
      Nice! I would recommend making the link clearer: unless I knew it was there, I would have missed it.
      - tjchear 6y ago
        Got it! I bolded the text. Also added one for Article Curation. Thank you for your advice and suggestion!
        gabagool 6y ago
        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.
        tjchear 6y ago
        It's most certainly not too much of an ask. I'll make the changes!
- johnx123-up 6y ago
  Any comparison with Glide?
  - tjchear 6y ago
    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.
    - dmlittle 6y ago
      Not sure if you've heard of Sheet2Site[1] which I believe is a direct competitor. [1] https://sheet2site.com/ https://sheet2site.com/
      - tjchear 6y ago
        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.
- platetone 6y ago
  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.
  - tjchear 6y ago
    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 :)
- eyelidlessness 6y ago
  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?
  - tjchear 6y ago
    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.
  - czzarr 6y ago
    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/56088344336 https://gsuite.google.com/marketplace/app/awesome_table/5608...
    - achow 6y ago
      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"."
- vijaybritto 6y ago
  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!
  - tjchear 6y ago
    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.
- franciscop 6y ago
  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 https://github.com/franciscop/drive-db
  - tjchear 6y ago
    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).
    - franciscop 6y ago
      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?
      - tjchear 6y ago
        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.
  - smuemd 6y ago
    This looks great. Thanks for sharing.
- joelrunyon 6y ago
  Do you have demos of current sites using this?
  - tjchear 6y ago
    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.
- MiSeRyDeee 6y ago
  What would be your business model?
  - tjchear 6y ago
    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 :)
- chris_st 6y ago
  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!
  - tjchear 6y ago
    I have not run across this issue before. How are you accessing the sheets though? Cloud Sheets API, or the json-in-script endpoint?
    - chris_st 6y ago
      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!
- andrei_says_ 6y ago
  Why is React needed to display static HTML?
  - mikeryan 6y ago
    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.
  - tjchear 6y ago
    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.
  - mrmonkeyman 6y ago
    The author needs the React-rails.
- rvnx 6y ago
  This is great, it's really something that Google POs should look at
- niutech 6y ago
  What's wrong with the existing solutions: https://sheetsu.com https://sheetsu.com https://sheety.co https://sheety.co https://www.sheet2site.com https://www.sheet2site.com https://steinhq.com https://steinhq.com https://www.glideapps.com https://www.glideapps.com
  - tjchear 6y ago
    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.
  - alyssaxuu 6y ago
    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-cms-or-a-database-f9d8e736fdce 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.
    - tjchear 6y ago
      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.
fortylove 6y ago
Very cool! I can see this being especially useful for communicating status of some process status, like for example, # of tests run today, outcome, etc.
- tjchear 6y ago
  I never thought about this use case! I'll note this down and include it as part of the use case section :) Thanks for the idea!
vosper 6y ago
You've done a wonderful job with explaining what it does, how, and why, all on the landing page.
- tjchear 6y ago
  Thank you! I was never good at doing landing pages so this comment means a lot to me.
- travbrack 6y ago
  The demo video is great. The only thing that could make it better is if you put the finished product in the beginning, then show how it's done.
  - tjchear 6y ago
    This is the sort of thing that makes perfect sense in retrospect but I never thought about. Thanks for the tip!
Giorgi 6y ago
Might I ask what soft was used to record demo?
- tjchear 6y ago
  It's a Chrome extension called Screen Recorder. Very nifty! I've used it for my other projects and I'm happy with it. Only downside is it generates webm only - I had to put it through an encoder.
anderspitman 6y ago
Services like this need an easy way to allow people to use their own domain names, and we need to lower the barrier of entry to individuals registering domains and setting up HTTPS. Imagine a SaaS that sells domains, then provides and easy (and open) API for delegating control over subdomains using OAuth2. So I sign up for sheetui, and during the registration process they redirect me to a namecheap.com (where anderspitman.net is registered) OAuth2 server, I grant them control over sheetui.anderspitman.net, and they can now host there on my behalf. sheetui.com also shouldn't have to deal with TLS certs. Why doesn't namecheap.com handle that for me? HTTP requests can be proxied through something like ngrok which again uses OAuth2 tokens for auth. Now we have a stack where people can securely host websites from there phone.
- tjchear 6y ago
  This is an interesting use case (the delegation of subdomain). Sounds like something that can be built atop Amazon Route 53. Have you seen this need come up a lot?
  - anderspitman 6y ago
    I think it would be helpful for decentralizing things, ie less necessary for the web we have than the web I want. For example I'm working on a project right now that's ideal for self-hosting, but I really want to encourage people to use their own domain names, and registering them and handling HTTPS is a rather large barrier.
  - hanniabu 6y ago
    Personally I would love the ability to show data on my website using a Google sheet where others less technical can contribute to (open source projects) as opposed to editing json files. It would only make sense for me to do it if it's still hosted under my domain though.
- vertex-four 6y ago
  Hahaha oh wow, I had a design document for this last year, down to the details. OAuth2 doesn't quite fit the bill without a little modification, unfortunately.
tjchear 6y ago
FYI to folks who are trying it out now - on step 3, you'll have to click on an element on the preview UI so you could customize it. You can customize it to show a particular column by clicking the + button. Without customization, the resulting page will not show anything. I'll fix this in the next iteration by providing defaults.
- Shermanium 6y ago
  thanks - emailing you about my project!
alin23 6y ago
Great idea and execution! I've been using Liftoff[1] with Airtable as a DIY solution for this and while it's been easy to set it up and deploy it on Netlify, I still had to resort to writing a custom watch for changes daemon and forking the repo for adjusting the components layout. I like that SheetUI has the things above built-in and more functionalities like adding buttons and a customisation UI. Is a custom-CSS feature going to be available anytime soon? It would be great to be able to add some original styling to a website. [1] https://github.com/postlight/liftoff https://github.com/postlight/liftoff
- tjchear 6y ago
  SheetUI is built using Material UI, which I'm still getting the hang of. It certainly has support for parameterized themes. As for custom CSS, I'm going to have to look into how to do that technically while making sure there's no security implications. Thanks for showing me Liftoff! The generated websites look great. I'll see what I can learn from it.
  - alin23 6y ago
    I think just allowing a CSS textarea input that can be injected inside a <style> HTML tag is enough. If the input is HTML escaped (replace <, > and other dangerous characters) then nothing should escape out of that tag. Thank you for considering this!
paul_milovanov 6y ago
Well, sheeeet. (might want to rethink naming)
- tjchear 6y ago
  It's definitely crossed my mind (and others as well). But as long as it conveys the idea, I'm fine with it :)
deleted 6y ago
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hogFeast 6y ago
Does this only work with public sheets?
- tjchear 6y ago
  For now, yes. I'm hard at work building Google Sheets API integration so you won't have to make your sheet public.
  - hogFeast 6y ago
    But presumably, that is going to cost you $15k or whatever it is now to be an approved user of Google API?
    - tjchear 6y ago
      I don't think so. I just need to procure an API key and some credentials from Cloud Console to begin using Sheet API. The rest is just a lot more backend development for me.
      - hogFeast 6y ago
        Right, but won't you need permissions to access data in user accounts? You can only get permissions with a Google audit (which you have to pay for).
        thesandlord 6y ago
        No, the easiest way is to use a service account and share the sheet with the service account. No need for user OAuth at all. https://github.com/juampynr/google-spreadsheet-reader https://github.com/juampynr/google-spreadsheet-reader
        hogFeast 6y ago
        Would you build a livelihood on that? I have heard of that but it sounds like the kind of loophole that got the industry into a situation where you needed to pay tens of thousands to use an API.
adamfeldman 6y ago
It'd be interesting to use this alongside the Google Sheets connector [1] for BigQuery [1]: https://cloud.google.com/blog/products/g-suite/connecting-bigquery-and-google-sheets-to-help-with-hefty-data-analysis https://cloud.google.com/blog/products/g-suite/connecting-bi...
- tjchear 6y ago
  I can see a need for this. I'll look into it!
zenojevski 6y ago
Not quite the same, but... Turn your Google Sheets into a beautiful Gopherhole :) https://github.com/zenoamaro/gophersheet https://github.com/zenoamaro/gophersheet A much closer transformation.
- tjchear 6y ago
  Ooh. Can you explain what a Gopherhole is?
  - 867-5309 6y ago
    > Ooh matron
  - TJSomething 6y ago
    I think a Gopherhole is to the Gopher protocol as a website is to HTTP.
alpb 6y ago
I also recently built a URL shortener on top of Sheets API (https://github.com/ahmetb/sheets-url-shortener https://github.com/ahmetb/sheets-url-shortener) and I don't have to worry about setting up a database or other form of storage. All I needed to do was set up credentials, and it's good to go. A lot of folks don't realize Google Sheets is like a free small database with a decent API. :)
- tjchear 6y ago
  Precisely! A lot of folks have already built their businesses and processes atop Google Sheets, so it seems a no-brainer to me that any SaaS dealing with data should have a way to bootstrap from that.
kpennell 6y ago
How to use google sheets + react together: https://www.developintelligence.com/blog/2018/08/the-simple-stack-a-primer-on-using-react-google-sheets-api/ https://www.developintelligence.com/blog/2018/08/the-simple-...
notJim 6y ago
How does this compare to sheet 2 site? Just wondering.
- tjchear 6y ago
  Commented here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23761645 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23761645
londons_explore 6y ago
This product is great... But it makes me feel sad to think about all the webpages that hide a small amount of tabular data in an oversized web UI. I want the reverse of this service - I just want the raw data from any web page in a spreadsheet ready to filter and sort and define new columns as I please...
- tjchear 6y ago
  What you just described is essentially a scraper/crawler right? Would scraping them into a sheet you own be sufficient for your use case?
  - londons_explore 6y ago
    Yes, but currently the process of writing a scraper for a given page is usually half an hour with beautiful soup... Or more if you have to handle multiple pages, Auth cookies that expire, and rate limits. Example usecase:. eBay search results, I want to sort by "Price plus $0.50 per mile from me", since I'm going to have to drive my van to pick up the item. That would be super easy with a spreadsheet of the search results, and I could probably have the data sorted in under 60 seconds on a column of "=B5+C5*0.5"
    - tjchear 6y ago
      It's the complete opposite of what SheetUI hopes to achieve, but this is such an interesting use case I'll think more about it :) I can see how there might be a legitimately strong demand for it. Feel free to connect with me (tjchear on twitter/linkedin/gmail) to discuss this further.
- contravariant 6y ago
  This is one of the reasons I really like that some webpages have taken to using JSON REST endpoints to provide the data for their (usually React-based) webpage. It makes it fantastically easy to circumvent all the complicated stuff and just directly access the data. It's somewhat of a shame that HTML never quite managed to split data from representation. It managed to separate content and styling, but the content is still treated as some kind of text document, not a textual representation of some data.
CitrusFruits 6y ago
Awesome work! I can see another variation of this being useful as well. Instead of loading live data all the time, it loads the data at time of publishing and creates a static html page with an option to auto-publish to github pages or netlify or something like that.
- tjchear 6y ago
  Ooh, yes. I can see how this could be something that is sorely needed. Added to my list of feature exploration!
akdarrah 6y ago
This looks really cool! I love your quick video that shows how to use the product and build a great looking UI so quickly. I'm guessing you guys use Liquid based on the curly braces? It looks like you have a pretty nice UI for manipulating the dynamic data, but if you're interested, my product helps people write Liquid: https://www.dropkiq.com/ https://www.dropkiq.com/ Let me know if you're interested. Otherwise, best of luck with your product!
- tjchear 6y ago
  I implemented the parsing part! This is the first I've heard of Liquid though. When SheetUI has gained sufficient traction that people need advanced Liquid support, I'll look to your product for that :) There is no price quoted on your page though; do you mind telling us here a ballpark figure?
  - akdarrah 6y ago
    Awesome! Yea, Liquid is a pretty robust language built by Shopify that is implemented in most languages to help with this exact problem. It might come in handy some day as you scale your app. :) For Dropkiq, your app looks simple enough (for the Liquid part) that you could likely use our free version. For apps that have complex Liquid, we have our Pro version, which I'm currently offering beta pricing at around 1K per year. Keep us in mind as you grow! :D
    - tjchear 6y ago
      Got it akdarrah! Thanks for letting me know about Liquid and your wonderful product!
  - theluketowers 6y ago
    Note that Liquid is quite similar to Twig, which is used in quite a bit more projects than just Shopify.
deleted 6y ago
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kovek 6y ago
Is there a tool that does the reverse? It would also be very interesting. Turn any webpage into a spreadsheet.
- tjchear 6y ago
  There was one other comment that mentioned the same thing. I'll look into this. How can I chat with you further about this? My email's tjchear at gmail if you want to reach out.
- jeffbee 6y ago
  Sheets itself does a remarkable job of pasting HTML into a sheet. I just tried it with English Wikipedia's list of the world's largest cities and it worked perfectly, except the column of photographs is blank instead, which is a reasonable choice.
rcshubhadeep 6y ago
really cool. Love the idea.
three_seagrass 6y ago
Ha, does this qualify as a headless cms?
- tjchear 6y ago
  Far from it! The backend is provided by Google Sheets. Much of what I do with SheetUI is to provide an easy-to-use editor and a beautiful front-end to visualize the data coming from the sheets.
dvt 6y ago
This is great, congrats on the launch! I've noticed a lot of products recently that attempt to solve this.
- tjchear 6y ago
  Got any examples of such products? I'd love to learn from them, and hopefully find my own niche :)
  - dvt 6y ago
    Just a few that came up on my Google search (basically, most are turning various sheets into something else!): - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16636935 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16636935 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16636935 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16636935 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19902856 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19902856 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21004039 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21004039
    - tjchear 6y ago
      Thanks! These products are great (I can see myself using a couple of them). I think when we look across all industries that use spreadsheets, we'll find a market that's so big that any player can find their own profitable niche. I hope to find mine.
rnotaro 6y ago
Anyone have a end-result demo page that I can look at? I would like to see what it looks like.
- tjchear 6y ago
  Pardon the long links, this is something I'll address in the next iteration. Product Catalog: https://sheetui.com/view/grid/image-tile/1F92PXwyE5CTjkT-Sin3fZcKaZsiA_px22X7L6j_YV6I/2/render?pageTitle=Product%20Catalog&imgSrc=%7B%7BProduct%20Image%7D%7D&title=%7B%7BProduct%20Name%7D%7D&subtitle=%7B%7BPrice%7D%7D https://sheetui.com/view/grid/image-tile/1F92PXwyE5CTjkT-Sin... Pokemons: https://sheetui.com/view/responsive-grid/media-card-2/1F92PXwyE5CTjkT-Sin3fZcKaZsiA_px22X7L6j_YV6I/4/render?pageTitle=Pokemon&pageDesc=Collection%20of%20pokemons%20that%20I%20own!&imgSrc=%7B%7BImage%7D%7D&title=%7B%7BName%7D%7D&subtitle=%7B%7BType%7D%7D&description=%7B%7BAbilities%7D%7D&btnPrimaryCaption=More%20Info&btnPrimaryLink=%7B%7BLink%7D%7D https://sheetui.com/view/responsive-grid/media-card-2/1F92PX... Team roster: https://sheetui.com/view/responsive-grid/media-card-2/1F92PXwyE5CTjkT-Sin3fZcKaZsiA_px22X7L6j_YV6I/1/render?pageTitle=Our%20Team&pageDesc=Our%20lovely%20teammates%20from%20all%20over%20the%20country%20%E2%9D%A4%EF%B8%8F&imgSrc=%7B%7BProfile%20Image%7D%7D&title=%7B%7BFirst%20Name%7D%7D%20%7B%7BLast%20Name%7D%7D&subtitle=%7B%7BOccupation%7D%7D&description=%7B%7BDescription%7D%7D&btnPrimaryCaption=Email%20Me&btnPrimaryLink=mailto%3A%7B%7BEmail%7D%7D https://sheetui.com/view/responsive-grid/media-card-2/1F92PX...
davide_v 6y ago
If I update the sheet, the website updates too?
- tjchear 6y ago
  The sheet is retrieved client-side, so yes, you should see the new updates when you refresh the webpage.
greatNespresso 6y ago
Love the execution of your idea. Having played with google sheet too (using it as my storage for https://nooze.world https://nooze.world actually) and having followed sheet2site story, I am left wondering if there is still money to make for services like this in 2020.
- tjchear 6y ago
  There is always room for improvement! For now, SheetUI doesn't do the same thing as Sheet2Site (they generate an entire website, whereas SheetUI generates only single web page per sheet). Considering how many people across so many industries use Google Sheets as part of their processes, I'm convinced there is some money to be made.
bawana 6y ago
I guess I could put blog entries into a google sheet and publish them with this.
- tjchear 6y ago
  Yes, that is a great use case! Let me know how it works for you. Feel free to reach out to me at tjchear over twitter/linkedin/gmail.
abhisheksamanta 6y ago
This is awesome. Congratulations, and best of luck. I played around with the product little bit and it looks really nice.
- tjchear 6y ago
  Thank you! I hope all is well with you and your project!
julienb_sea 6y ago
In college I would make primitive webpages for my college newspaper to use for live feeds and such content publishing. I built something like this (although vastly less polished) - the writers could just fill in details in a sheet & add image URLs, and my static page could retrieve the spreadsheet contents via API and essentially have a super cheap data backend with a super fancy collaborative editor. Fun times.
- tjchear 6y ago
  That is the perfect use case! Sheets already got a lot of features baked into it, no point re-inventing.
uptown 6y ago
I used to drive a restaurant website's menu using a shared Google sheet. It was an easy way for multiple people to have access to update the content. I'd cached the recent versions in-case anyone made a breaking formatting change or Google was unavailable. Worked very well for our use-case.
- tjchear 6y ago
  That's a good point. I should cache the generated sites or the sheet's data in case the sheet server goes down.
czzarr 6y ago
So why not use Awesome Table? one of the very top G Suite Marketplace apps: https://gsuite.google.com/marketplace/app/awesome_table/56088344336 https://gsuite.google.com/marketplace/app/awesome_table/5608...
- tjchear 6y ago
  Never heard of it, but it looks really well done! It also mirrors Google Sheet's UI closely for easier onboarding. I guess at this point you can say SheetUI is a pale copy of it and I'd have nothing to counter. That said, their margin is my opportunity, and I can definitely find opportunities amongst users whom AwesomeTable has not fully satisfied. Thanks for bringing this to my attention - I'll learn from them and improve my craft.
- achow 6y ago
  Copy/Pasting my reply to the exact same comment posted elsewhere. ------------------------------------------------------ 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"." ------------------------------------------------------
klener 6y ago
Interesting approach. You know them openasapp? They also try to sit on top of a sheet to create apps https://www.openasapp.com/ https://www.openasapp.com/
fermienrico 6y ago
Crazy I know: why not just link them to the sheet? If the goal is for one person to convey information to another, why do we need to “decorate” it? I kind of like some of the Brutalism takes on web design. Just throw away all decoration and live with the ugly world, “ugly” being subjective. I think excel sheets are actually quite beautiful. Challenge the status quo :-) at the expense of coolness, dignity and comfort.
- priomsrb 6y ago
  Ugliness aside, there are some things that don't work very well in a plain spreadsheet vs a UI. For example large paragraphs and images. Part of conveying information should be about making the information easy to digest. Sometimes a spreadsheet fits that bill. Other times a crafted UI works better.
  - fermienrico 6y ago
    It does if you create large cells and stick paragraphs in. Make sure the width of the cell is enough for 12-15 words. Images also work just fine. It truly boils down to "uglyness" and not functionality. "Easy to digest" is a subjective term. Excel sheets are essentially rectangular grid with borders. Grids have been used since the 60's in graphic design, primarily championed by the Swiss Grid System (Josef-muller brockmann, et. al). So if you say that excel sheets are not a good instrument to convey information, you're saying that a grid like structure is not good at laying out information in a logical, understandable fashion. Which is provably false - everything from Tax forms to road signs, every bit of graphic design professionally conducted uses the grid system. Think a bit deeper than just aesthetics and ask yourself, what exactly is an excel sheet? It is a bunch of boxes. Whether those are div elements or excel cells, what's the difference? Padding and margins?
    - tjchear 6y ago
      I agree with this to some extent. The aesthetics, even if it does almost nothing for functionality, unfortunately does influence people's impression and opinion, and ultimately, their decision to open their wallet. When the SaaS world is filled with players who each bring something to the table, aesthetics sometimes becomes a tie-breaker, so to speak.
abhayhegde 6y ago
Wonderful product! I was looking to build a page on a team that I am working with, but wanted a simple integration like this. Kudos! I would like to know if you are going to add more features later. For example, informal 'About us' pages would have links to social media in their bios. So can we have more than primary and secondary buttons? Also, it would be lovely to have profile photo frame customizable. It looks stylish to have the photo embedded in a circular frame for example.
- tjchear 6y ago
  These are great ideas! I'll add them to SheetUI's feature roadmap. Definitely reach out to me at tjchear (twitter/linkedin/gmail) and we can talk about what you need.
- tjchear 6y ago
  Hi abhayhegde, I just added more social media icon links to all of the UI components, so you can add links to social media. Circular frame coming soon!
  - abhayhegde 6y ago
    Thanks much! I just checked this out, it looks amazing and simple.
siquick 6y ago
Cool idea. What's the thinking behind the 'per day' billing? I've never seen this before.
- tjchear 6y ago
  Whoops. That was a mistake I made from copying that section from another project. Corrected it to per month now.
raybb 6y ago
Wow this is just what I need for a little project I've been working on! Look forward to using it :)
- niutech 6y ago
  You can also use Sheetsu https://sheetsu.com https://sheetsu.com, Glide https://www.glideapps.com/ https://www.glideapps.com/ or Stein Expedite https://steinhq.com https://steinhq.com
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
edusig 6y ago
I think the greatest challenge will be creating enough elements/visualizations and customization to please most customers. Our team at Sheet.Best (https://sheet.best https://sheet.best) was just talking about reducing the entry barrier for our services and one of the ideas was something like this. Nice to see more competition on the "no code" approach to use spreadsheets as databases :).

425 points by tjchear 6y ago

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!

wiremine 6y ago
Great idea! The video on the homepage is very useful; have you thought about linking to some examples?
- tjchear 6y ago
  Oh this is a good idea! Let me do that.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
- tjchear 6y ago
  I added one so far (Product Catalog), you can click on it in the use case section. More to come :)
  - wiremine 6y ago
    Nice! I would recommend making the link clearer: unless I knew it was there, I would have missed it.
    - tjchear 6y ago
      Got it! I bolded the text. Also added one for Article Curation. Thank you for your advice and suggestion!
      - gabagool 6y ago
        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.
        tjchear 6y ago
        It's most certainly not too much of an ask. I'll make the changes!
johnx123-up 6y ago
Any comparison with Glide?
- tjchear 6y ago
  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.
  - dmlittle 6y ago
    Not sure if you've heard of Sheet2Site[1] which I believe is a direct competitor. [1] https://sheet2site.com/ https://sheet2site.com/
    - tjchear 6y ago
      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.
platetone 6y ago
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.
- tjchear 6y ago
  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 :)
eyelidlessness 6y ago
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?
- tjchear 6y ago
  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.
- czzarr 6y ago
  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/56088344336 https://gsuite.google.com/marketplace/app/awesome_table/5608...
  - achow 6y ago
    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"."
vijaybritto 6y ago
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!
- tjchear 6y ago
  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.
franciscop 6y ago
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 https://github.com/franciscop/drive-db
- tjchear 6y ago
  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).
  - franciscop 6y ago
    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?
    - tjchear 6y ago
      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.
- smuemd 6y ago
  This looks great. Thanks for sharing.
joelrunyon 6y ago
Do you have demos of current sites using this?
- tjchear 6y ago
  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.
MiSeRyDeee 6y ago
What would be your business model?
- tjchear 6y ago
  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 :)
chris_st 6y ago
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!
- tjchear 6y ago
  I have not run across this issue before. How are you accessing the sheets though? Cloud Sheets API, or the json-in-script endpoint?
  - chris_st 6y ago
    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!
andrei_says_ 6y ago
Why is React needed to display static HTML?
- mikeryan 6y ago
  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.
- tjchear 6y ago
  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.
- mrmonkeyman 6y ago
  The author needs the React-rails.
rvnx 6y ago
This is great, it's really something that Google POs should look at
niutech 6y ago
What's wrong with the existing solutions: https://sheetsu.com https://sheetsu.com https://sheety.co https://sheety.co https://www.sheet2site.com https://www.sheet2site.com https://steinhq.com https://steinhq.com https://www.glideapps.com https://www.glideapps.com
- tjchear 6y ago
  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.
- alyssaxuu 6y ago
  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-cms-or-a-database-f9d8e736fdce 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.
  - tjchear 6y ago
    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.

fortylove 6y ago

Very cool! I can see this being especially useful for communicating status of some process status, like for example, # of tests run today, outcome, etc.

tjchear 6y ago
I never thought about this use case! I'll note this down and include it as part of the use case section :) Thanks for the idea!

vosper 6y ago

You've done a wonderful job with explaining what it does, how, and why, all on the landing page.

tjchear 6y ago
Thank you! I was never good at doing landing pages so this comment means a lot to me.
travbrack 6y ago
The demo video is great. The only thing that could make it better is if you put the finished product in the beginning, then show how it's done.
- tjchear 6y ago
  This is the sort of thing that makes perfect sense in retrospect but I never thought about. Thanks for the tip!

Giorgi 6y ago

Might I ask what soft was used to record demo?

tjchear 6y ago
It's a Chrome extension called Screen Recorder. Very nifty! I've used it for my other projects and I'm happy with it. Only downside is it generates webm only - I had to put it through an encoder.

anderspitman 6y ago

Services like this need an easy way to allow people to use their own domain names, and we need to lower the barrier of entry to individuals registering domains and setting up HTTPS. Imagine a SaaS that sells domains, then provides and easy (and open) API for delegating control over subdomains using OAuth2. So I sign up for sheetui, and during the registration process they redirect me to a namecheap.com (where anderspitman.net is registered) OAuth2 server, I grant them control over sheetui.anderspitman.net, and they can now host there on my behalf. sheetui.com also shouldn't have to deal with TLS certs. Why doesn't namecheap.com handle that for me? HTTP requests can be proxied through something like ngrok which again uses OAuth2 tokens for auth. Now we have a stack where people can securely host websites from there phone.

tjchear 6y ago
This is an interesting use case (the delegation of subdomain). Sounds like something that can be built atop Amazon Route 53. Have you seen this need come up a lot?
- anderspitman 6y ago
  I think it would be helpful for decentralizing things, ie less necessary for the web we have than the web I want. For example I'm working on a project right now that's ideal for self-hosting, but I really want to encourage people to use their own domain names, and registering them and handling HTTPS is a rather large barrier.
- hanniabu 6y ago
  Personally I would love the ability to show data on my website using a Google sheet where others less technical can contribute to (open source projects) as opposed to editing json files. It would only make sense for me to do it if it's still hosted under my domain though.
vertex-four 6y ago
Hahaha oh wow, I had a design document for this last year, down to the details. OAuth2 doesn't quite fit the bill without a little modification, unfortunately.

tjchear 6y ago

FYI to folks who are trying it out now - on step 3, you'll have to click on an element on the preview UI so you could customize it. You can customize it to show a particular column by clicking the + button. Without customization, the resulting page will not show anything. I'll fix this in the next iteration by providing defaults.

Shermanium 6y ago
thanks - emailing you about my project!

alin23 6y ago

Great idea and execution! I've been using Liftoff[1] with Airtable as a DIY solution for this and while it's been easy to set it up and deploy it on Netlify, I still had to resort to writing a custom watch for changes daemon and forking the repo for adjusting the components layout. I like that SheetUI has the things above built-in and more functionalities like adding buttons and a customisation UI. Is a custom-CSS feature going to be available anytime soon? It would be great to be able to add some original styling to a website. [1] https://github.com/postlight/liftoff https://github.com/postlight/liftoff

tjchear 6y ago
SheetUI is built using Material UI, which I'm still getting the hang of. It certainly has support for parameterized themes. As for custom CSS, I'm going to have to look into how to do that technically while making sure there's no security implications. Thanks for showing me Liftoff! The generated websites look great. I'll see what I can learn from it.
- alin23 6y ago
  I think just allowing a CSS textarea input that can be injected inside a <style> HTML tag is enough. If the input is HTML escaped (replace <, > and other dangerous characters) then nothing should escape out of that tag. Thank you for considering this!

paul_milovanov 6y ago

Well, sheeeet. (might want to rethink naming)

tjchear 6y ago
It's definitely crossed my mind (and others as well). But as long as it conveys the idea, I'm fine with it :)

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

hogFeast 6y ago

Does this only work with public sheets?

tjchear 6y ago
For now, yes. I'm hard at work building Google Sheets API integration so you won't have to make your sheet public.
- hogFeast 6y ago
  But presumably, that is going to cost you $15k or whatever it is now to be an approved user of Google API?
  - tjchear 6y ago
    I don't think so. I just need to procure an API key and some credentials from Cloud Console to begin using Sheet API. The rest is just a lot more backend development for me.
    - hogFeast 6y ago
      Right, but won't you need permissions to access data in user accounts? You can only get permissions with a Google audit (which you have to pay for).
      - thesandlord 6y ago
        No, the easiest way is to use a service account and share the sheet with the service account. No need for user OAuth at all. https://github.com/juampynr/google-spreadsheet-reader https://github.com/juampynr/google-spreadsheet-reader
        hogFeast 6y ago
        Would you build a livelihood on that? I have heard of that but it sounds like the kind of loophole that got the industry into a situation where you needed to pay tens of thousands to use an API.

adamfeldman 6y ago

It'd be interesting to use this alongside the Google Sheets connector [1] for BigQuery [1]: https://cloud.google.com/blog/products/g-suite/connecting-bigquery-and-google-sheets-to-help-with-hefty-data-analysis https://cloud.google.com/blog/products/g-suite/connecting-bi...

tjchear 6y ago
I can see a need for this. I'll look into it!

zenojevski 6y ago

Not quite the same, but... Turn your Google Sheets into a beautiful Gopherhole :) https://github.com/zenoamaro/gophersheet https://github.com/zenoamaro/gophersheet A much closer transformation.

tjchear 6y ago
Ooh. Can you explain what a Gopherhole is?
- 867-5309 6y ago
  > Ooh matron
- TJSomething 6y ago
  I think a Gopherhole is to the Gopher protocol as a website is to HTTP.

alpb 6y ago

I also recently built a URL shortener on top of Sheets API (https://github.com/ahmetb/sheets-url-shortener https://github.com/ahmetb/sheets-url-shortener) and I don't have to worry about setting up a database or other form of storage. All I needed to do was set up credentials, and it's good to go. A lot of folks don't realize Google Sheets is like a free small database with a decent API. :)

tjchear 6y ago
Precisely! A lot of folks have already built their businesses and processes atop Google Sheets, so it seems a no-brainer to me that any SaaS dealing with data should have a way to bootstrap from that.

kpennell 6y ago

How to use google sheets + react together: https://www.developintelligence.com/blog/2018/08/the-simple-stack-a-primer-on-using-react-google-sheets-api/ https://www.developintelligence.com/blog/2018/08/the-simple-...

notJim 6y ago

How does this compare to sheet 2 site? Just wondering.

tjchear 6y ago
Commented here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23761645 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23761645

londons_explore 6y ago

This product is great... But it makes me feel sad to think about all the webpages that hide a small amount of tabular data in an oversized web UI. I want the reverse of this service - I just want the raw data from any web page in a spreadsheet ready to filter and sort and define new columns as I please...

tjchear 6y ago
What you just described is essentially a scraper/crawler right? Would scraping them into a sheet you own be sufficient for your use case?
- londons_explore 6y ago
  Yes, but currently the process of writing a scraper for a given page is usually half an hour with beautiful soup... Or more if you have to handle multiple pages, Auth cookies that expire, and rate limits. Example usecase:. eBay search results, I want to sort by "Price plus $0.50 per mile from me", since I'm going to have to drive my van to pick up the item. That would be super easy with a spreadsheet of the search results, and I could probably have the data sorted in under 60 seconds on a column of "=B5+C5*0.5"
  - tjchear 6y ago
    It's the complete opposite of what SheetUI hopes to achieve, but this is such an interesting use case I'll think more about it :) I can see how there might be a legitimately strong demand for it. Feel free to connect with me (tjchear on twitter/linkedin/gmail) to discuss this further.
contravariant 6y ago
This is one of the reasons I really like that some webpages have taken to using JSON REST endpoints to provide the data for their (usually React-based) webpage. It makes it fantastically easy to circumvent all the complicated stuff and just directly access the data. It's somewhat of a shame that HTML never quite managed to split data from representation. It managed to separate content and styling, but the content is still treated as some kind of text document, not a textual representation of some data.

CitrusFruits 6y ago

Awesome work! I can see another variation of this being useful as well. Instead of loading live data all the time, it loads the data at time of publishing and creates a static html page with an option to auto-publish to github pages or netlify or something like that.

tjchear 6y ago
Ooh, yes. I can see how this could be something that is sorely needed. Added to my list of feature exploration!

akdarrah 6y ago

This looks really cool! I love your quick video that shows how to use the product and build a great looking UI so quickly. I'm guessing you guys use Liquid based on the curly braces? It looks like you have a pretty nice UI for manipulating the dynamic data, but if you're interested, my product helps people write Liquid: https://www.dropkiq.com/ https://www.dropkiq.com/ Let me know if you're interested. Otherwise, best of luck with your product!

tjchear 6y ago
I implemented the parsing part! This is the first I've heard of Liquid though. When SheetUI has gained sufficient traction that people need advanced Liquid support, I'll look to your product for that :) There is no price quoted on your page though; do you mind telling us here a ballpark figure?
- akdarrah 6y ago
  Awesome! Yea, Liquid is a pretty robust language built by Shopify that is implemented in most languages to help with this exact problem. It might come in handy some day as you scale your app. :) For Dropkiq, your app looks simple enough (for the Liquid part) that you could likely use our free version. For apps that have complex Liquid, we have our Pro version, which I'm currently offering beta pricing at around 1K per year. Keep us in mind as you grow! :D
  - tjchear 6y ago
    Got it akdarrah! Thanks for letting me know about Liquid and your wonderful product!
- theluketowers 6y ago
  Note that Liquid is quite similar to Twig, which is used in quite a bit more projects than just Shopify.

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

kovek 6y ago

Is there a tool that does the reverse? It would also be very interesting. Turn any webpage into a spreadsheet.

tjchear 6y ago
There was one other comment that mentioned the same thing. I'll look into this. How can I chat with you further about this? My email's tjchear at gmail if you want to reach out.
jeffbee 6y ago
Sheets itself does a remarkable job of pasting HTML into a sheet. I just tried it with English Wikipedia's list of the world's largest cities and it worked perfectly, except the column of photographs is blank instead, which is a reasonable choice.

rcshubhadeep 6y ago

really cool. Love the idea.

three_seagrass 6y ago

Ha, does this qualify as a headless cms?

tjchear 6y ago
Far from it! The backend is provided by Google Sheets. Much of what I do with SheetUI is to provide an easy-to-use editor and a beautiful front-end to visualize the data coming from the sheets.

dvt 6y ago

This is great, congrats on the launch! I've noticed a lot of products recently that attempt to solve this.

tjchear 6y ago
Got any examples of such products? I'd love to learn from them, and hopefully find my own niche :)
- dvt 6y ago
  Just a few that came up on my Google search (basically, most are turning various sheets into something else!): - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16636935 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16636935 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16636935 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16636935 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19902856 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19902856 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21004039 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21004039
  - tjchear 6y ago
    Thanks! These products are great (I can see myself using a couple of them). I think when we look across all industries that use spreadsheets, we'll find a market that's so big that any player can find their own profitable niche. I hope to find mine.

rnotaro 6y ago

Anyone have a end-result demo page that I can look at? I would like to see what it looks like.

tjchear 6y ago
Pardon the long links, this is something I'll address in the next iteration. Product Catalog: https://sheetui.com/view/grid/image-tile/1F92PXwyE5CTjkT-Sin3fZcKaZsiA_px22X7L6j_YV6I/2/render?pageTitle=Product%20Catalog&imgSrc=%7B%7BProduct%20Image%7D%7D&title=%7B%7BProduct%20Name%7D%7D&subtitle=%7B%7BPrice%7D%7D https://sheetui.com/view/grid/image-tile/1F92PXwyE5CTjkT-Sin... Pokemons: https://sheetui.com/view/responsive-grid/media-card-2/1F92PXwyE5CTjkT-Sin3fZcKaZsiA_px22X7L6j_YV6I/4/render?pageTitle=Pokemon&pageDesc=Collection%20of%20pokemons%20that%20I%20own!&imgSrc=%7B%7BImage%7D%7D&title=%7B%7BName%7D%7D&subtitle=%7B%7BType%7D%7D&description=%7B%7BAbilities%7D%7D&btnPrimaryCaption=More%20Info&btnPrimaryLink=%7B%7BLink%7D%7D https://sheetui.com/view/responsive-grid/media-card-2/1F92PX... Team roster: https://sheetui.com/view/responsive-grid/media-card-2/1F92PXwyE5CTjkT-Sin3fZcKaZsiA_px22X7L6j_YV6I/1/render?pageTitle=Our%20Team&pageDesc=Our%20lovely%20teammates%20from%20all%20over%20the%20country%20%E2%9D%A4%EF%B8%8F&imgSrc=%7B%7BProfile%20Image%7D%7D&title=%7B%7BFirst%20Name%7D%7D%20%7B%7BLast%20Name%7D%7D&subtitle=%7B%7BOccupation%7D%7D&description=%7B%7BDescription%7D%7D&btnPrimaryCaption=Email%20Me&btnPrimaryLink=mailto%3A%7B%7BEmail%7D%7D https://sheetui.com/view/responsive-grid/media-card-2/1F92PX...

davide_v 6y ago

If I update the sheet, the website updates too?

tjchear 6y ago
The sheet is retrieved client-side, so yes, you should see the new updates when you refresh the webpage.

greatNespresso 6y ago

Love the execution of your idea. Having played with google sheet too (using it as my storage for https://nooze.world https://nooze.world actually) and having followed sheet2site story, I am left wondering if there is still money to make for services like this in 2020.

tjchear 6y ago
There is always room for improvement! For now, SheetUI doesn't do the same thing as Sheet2Site (they generate an entire website, whereas SheetUI generates only single web page per sheet). Considering how many people across so many industries use Google Sheets as part of their processes, I'm convinced there is some money to be made.

bawana 6y ago

I guess I could put blog entries into a google sheet and publish them with this.

tjchear 6y ago
Yes, that is a great use case! Let me know how it works for you. Feel free to reach out to me at tjchear over twitter/linkedin/gmail.

abhisheksamanta 6y ago

This is awesome. Congratulations, and best of luck. I played around with the product little bit and it looks really nice.

tjchear 6y ago
Thank you! I hope all is well with you and your project!

julienb_sea 6y ago

In college I would make primitive webpages for my college newspaper to use for live feeds and such content publishing. I built something like this (although vastly less polished) - the writers could just fill in details in a sheet & add image URLs, and my static page could retrieve the spreadsheet contents via API and essentially have a super cheap data backend with a super fancy collaborative editor. Fun times.

tjchear 6y ago
That is the perfect use case! Sheets already got a lot of features baked into it, no point re-inventing.

uptown 6y ago

I used to drive a restaurant website's menu using a shared Google sheet. It was an easy way for multiple people to have access to update the content. I'd cached the recent versions in-case anyone made a breaking formatting change or Google was unavailable. Worked very well for our use-case.

tjchear 6y ago
That's a good point. I should cache the generated sites or the sheet's data in case the sheet server goes down.

czzarr 6y ago

So why not use Awesome Table? one of the very top G Suite Marketplace apps: https://gsuite.google.com/marketplace/app/awesome_table/56088344336 https://gsuite.google.com/marketplace/app/awesome_table/5608...

tjchear 6y ago
Never heard of it, but it looks really well done! It also mirrors Google Sheet's UI closely for easier onboarding. I guess at this point you can say SheetUI is a pale copy of it and I'd have nothing to counter. That said, their margin is my opportunity, and I can definitely find opportunities amongst users whom AwesomeTable has not fully satisfied. Thanks for bringing this to my attention - I'll learn from them and improve my craft.
achow 6y ago
Copy/Pasting my reply to the exact same comment posted elsewhere. ------------------------------------------------------ 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"." ------------------------------------------------------

klener 6y ago

Interesting approach. You know them openasapp? They also try to sit on top of a sheet to create apps https://www.openasapp.com/ https://www.openasapp.com/

fermienrico 6y ago

Crazy I know: why not just link them to the sheet? If the goal is for one person to convey information to another, why do we need to “decorate” it? I kind of like some of the Brutalism takes on web design. Just throw away all decoration and live with the ugly world, “ugly” being subjective. I think excel sheets are actually quite beautiful. Challenge the status quo :-) at the expense of coolness, dignity and comfort.

priomsrb 6y ago
Ugliness aside, there are some things that don't work very well in a plain spreadsheet vs a UI. For example large paragraphs and images. Part of conveying information should be about making the information easy to digest. Sometimes a spreadsheet fits that bill. Other times a crafted UI works better.
- fermienrico 6y ago
  It does if you create large cells and stick paragraphs in. Make sure the width of the cell is enough for 12-15 words. Images also work just fine. It truly boils down to "uglyness" and not functionality. "Easy to digest" is a subjective term. Excel sheets are essentially rectangular grid with borders. Grids have been used since the 60's in graphic design, primarily championed by the Swiss Grid System (Josef-muller brockmann, et. al). So if you say that excel sheets are not a good instrument to convey information, you're saying that a grid like structure is not good at laying out information in a logical, understandable fashion. Which is provably false - everything from Tax forms to road signs, every bit of graphic design professionally conducted uses the grid system. Think a bit deeper than just aesthetics and ask yourself, what exactly is an excel sheet? It is a bunch of boxes. Whether those are div elements or excel cells, what's the difference? Padding and margins?
  - tjchear 6y ago
    I agree with this to some extent. The aesthetics, even if it does almost nothing for functionality, unfortunately does influence people's impression and opinion, and ultimately, their decision to open their wallet. When the SaaS world is filled with players who each bring something to the table, aesthetics sometimes becomes a tie-breaker, so to speak.

abhayhegde 6y ago

Wonderful product! I was looking to build a page on a team that I am working with, but wanted a simple integration like this. Kudos! I would like to know if you are going to add more features later. For example, informal 'About us' pages would have links to social media in their bios. So can we have more than primary and secondary buttons? Also, it would be lovely to have profile photo frame customizable. It looks stylish to have the photo embedded in a circular frame for example.

tjchear 6y ago
These are great ideas! I'll add them to SheetUI's feature roadmap. Definitely reach out to me at tjchear (twitter/linkedin/gmail) and we can talk about what you need.
tjchear 6y ago
Hi abhayhegde, I just added more social media icon links to all of the UI components, so you can add links to social media. Circular frame coming soon!
- abhayhegde 6y ago
  Thanks much! I just checked this out, it looks amazing and simple.

siquick 6y ago

Cool idea. What's the thinking behind the 'per day' billing? I've never seen this before.

tjchear 6y ago
Whoops. That was a mistake I made from copying that section from another project. Corrected it to per month now.

raybb 6y ago

Wow this is just what I need for a little project I've been working on! Look forward to using it :)

niutech 6y ago
You can also use Sheetsu https://sheetsu.com https://sheetsu.com, Glide https://www.glideapps.com/ https://www.glideapps.com/ or Stein Expedite https://steinhq.com https://steinhq.com

deleted 6y ago

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edusig 6y ago

I think the greatest challenge will be creating enough elements/visualizations and customization to please most customers. Our team at Sheet.Best (https://sheet.best https://sheet.best) was just talking about reducing the entry barrier for our services and one of the ideas was something like this. Nice to see more competition on the "no code" approach to use spreadsheets as databases :).