14 ms·

Grist is a modern, relational spreadsheet

471 points by protontypes 3y ago

kamphey 3y ago
This looks promising! I've been asked a lot about embeding google sheets into websites. Always been using a work around but this seems like it could be pretty special: "to show Grist spreadsheets on a website without any special back-end support, your options include grist-static, a fully in-browser build of Grist. "
- protontypes 3y ago
  That's exactly why I'm also very interested in using Grist. Embedding spreadsheets into web pages has never satisfied me and has resulted in unacceptable load times.
  - melih1im 3y ago
    Embedding spreadsheets especially with iframes seems alien in websites. I've used retable.io feature to get the data in json or html. It works great with wordpress https://go.retable.io/view4dvhJpM6LVTtjBG7/html https://go.retable.io/view4dvhJpM6LVTtjBG7/html
techn00 3y ago
open-core*
- sneak 3y ago
  Yes; I missed that. Thank you. More free software cosplay. :( > Grist Labs is an open-core company. We offer Grist hosting as a service, with free and paid plans. We also develop and sell features related to Grist using a proprietary license, targeted at the needs of enterprises with large self-managed installations. We see data portability and autonomy as a key value Grist can bring to our users, and grist-core as an essential means to deliver that. We are committed to maintaining and improving the grist-core codebase, and to be thoughtful about how proprietary offerings impact data portability and autonomy.
  - notyoutube 3y ago
    I tried the `grist-labs/grist-core` docker install: it's quite easy to set up and most of the useful features are there (I think it's mostly snapshots missing). I don't think "free software cosplay" is totally fair in this case. And compared to the alternatives (nocodb, mathesar, baserow) they seem to provide the best self-hosted/open source solution in terms of polish and features. *Edit* I've been looking for a while for a similar software stack for the organisation of a coop I'm a member of, and have not found anything better as of now, though open to alternatives!
    - paulfitz 3y ago
      Snapshots are there, but you need to configure an s3-like store to enable them, e.g. MinIO (or S3 itself). [Grist employee]
      - vviers 3y ago
        Can confirm that we're self-hosting a couple instances with snapshots enabled (using Scaleway's S3 buckets)
      - notyoutube 3y ago
        Noted, but can't edit my comment. Thanks!
    - sneak 3y ago
      Free software is an ideology based on respect for the four software freedoms. If you run an organization that sells proprietary software that also releases free software, you demonstrably don’t believe in the fundamental importance of the four software freedoms for users, otherwise you wouldn’t use copyright enforcement mechanisms to deny them to your non-customers. It’s like a factory that respects human rights for 95% of its employees; such a factory can’t be said to respect human rights. Microsoft releases a lot of free software, too. This is just a proprietary software vendor that wants to come off as a cool open source company; that’s all open core is: a marketing bullet point. I believe the term “open source cosplay” is appropriate. If you aren’t faking a personal respect for software freedoms, you consequently release 100% of all software you produce as free software. It’s okay to be a proprietary software vendor. Not everyone agrees on the four software freedoms being important. It’s just misleading and inconsistent to brand yourself with the ideology, and then not live up to that.
evan54 3y ago
What are the usecases for non standard spreadsheets? Ie when does one of libre office, google sheets or excel not suffice that people spend time developing a new spreadsheet software? Honest question..
- sneak 3y ago
  Libreoffice is missing huge swaths of features that Excel has, and isn’t very good. Google Sheet is a cloud service packed with surveillance, not software. Excel is proprietary and expensive and has invasive spyware. There is definitely a market for a good free software featureful spreadsheet tool.
  - pbhjpbhj 3y ago
    What would you say the most important [to you] features are that LO is missing?
    - atoav 3y ago
      I am curious about that as well, because I heard that one often and whenever I ask: "Like what?" it is either some obscure function that you could build yourself with a few lines or it is crickets and a: "Don't know, I just like it better". Note: I am not saying there are no true and valid differences one or another person could really rely on. But having worked in IT-support I know that not few people like to give pseudo-rational reasons, when in fact it is often more about feelings. I don't say that feelings/look/design is irrelevant: "I like the design of Excel more", is a totally valid reason for choosing it over Libreoffice. But in the end many people pretend there is more to it. I have yet to encounter a situation that I couldn't resolve using Libreoffice Calcs features (ignoring insane scenarios where writing a well tested script or using an actual database would be the rational option).
      - 2pie 3y ago
        I would make a difference between "design" and "a lot of small and convenient functionalities that makes your life easier". People prefer gsheet to calc not because of one big missing functionality, because as you say, you can always find a way. It's more that excel/gsheet makes your life way easier, and saves you a lot of time. I use both gsheet (for work) and calc (for personal stuff). I really want to give calc a chance so I accept the excess time it takes me to use it, but I understand that some people don't. And I would not say that it's related to "feelings", it's more a problem of "ease of use" and "doing things fast".
melesian 3y ago
I help run a small non-profit that has managed data in a number of spreadsheets. Grist made it v simple to pull the data into a web site linking it together with a variety of different scrollable views. Came across it while looking for lo- and no-code solutions and quickly stopped looking. It was just the ticket.
- notyoutube 3y ago
  Could you expand on how the linking is done: * Are you self-hosting? * What auth method are you using? * How is the linking done? I presume API (or are you just using widgets?), but that means you need users to copy/paste their API key by hand? Thanks!
  - melesian 3y ago
    Not self-hosting. Linking by identifying key fields. Currently just using password login.
wood_spirit 3y ago
I always get excited about these databases-that-look-like-spreadsheets and then get frustrated when they stop me doing spreadsheety things. I want it to work the other way around: a spreadsheet with more databasy features I can choose to use: In the same way that the chart wizard can do a good job of spotting the “table” of data that the current cell is in, the spreadsheet could auto-detect natural tables and make it easy to create and manage named ranges etc. And then allow formulas to offer better ergonomics than vlookup etc and even allow sql etc? Things like allowing column widths to change for different rows in the same column etc would also be awesome. And offering an insert-column that automatically only inserts for the current table etc.
- pbhjpbhj 3y ago
  Yes, what I'd want is like a Jupyter notebook for spreadsheets. Drag a box to define a new table, intersperse whitespace with text/images/graphs/formulae (two cells) that aren't locked to a grid based on a upper-left table. Auto-recognise the first line in a table as a title, second line as column headings. LibreOffice already allows SQL on spreadsheets; but SQL formulae would be cool.
  - alexmojaki 3y ago
    You can embed an integrated Jupyter notebook into a Grist spreadsheet: https://github.com/gristlabs/jupyterlite-widget/blob/main/USAGE.md https://github.com/gristlabs/jupyterlite-widget/blob/main/US...
  - FredPret 3y ago
    I think Apple Numbers work like this
- twelvechairs 3y ago
  Yes the joy of a spreadsheet is the blank slate - you can just start writing random things in random boxes. What I'd like is something you can do both. Start writing random things but then slowly formalise - define columns as specific types for consistency etc. And if you do this enough end up with a structured database. But not force only one or the other
ale42 3y ago
... another Electron app? :-(
- maxloh 3y ago
  ~99% of third party native apps are ugly. :-(
- lordofgibbons 3y ago
  Honest question since I see a lot of similar comments on HN: Would you rather not have this application exist at all? Because doing this with native UI frameworks is such a massively larger amount of work, it's not even comparable. Speaking from not-so-fond memories of working with Qt..
  - Alifatisk 3y ago
    See it this way No application < Electron < Native app
  - nvella 3y ago
    From lived experience, creating a cross-platform application via abstracting the relevant native interfaces versus targeting web with all the _fun_ that entails are effectively equal levels of pain. Developing rich web apps isn’t free either; I needn’t go into the issues surrounding the revolving door of frameworks, contrived state management patterns that seem to change every year, the total lack of standard controls outside of built-in web elements that look awful which inevitably means that at some point, _you will_ have to be doing DOM manipulation for something that is otherwise built-in on an OS’s native toolkit, etc etc. And then when you put all of this together, you add yet another 500MB Chromium instance onto your user’s desktop and the thing feels like a social networking app. I’m not going to pretend that there’s currently a better solution because for the current set of constraints everything sucks. .NET has a few up-and-coming frameworks for cross-platform UI but nothing mature like WPF was. Java still produces noticeably slow applications. React Native could perhaps get part of the way there, but as far as I’m aware that mostly targets mobile.
    - 3y ago
kleiba 3y ago
Another sign that I'm getting old: the editing of the video is way too fast-paced for me to understand anything what's going on. :(
- fragmede 3y ago
  The corollary of YouTube/VLC/other programs being able to play videos back at 1.5x speed is that slowing videos down and playing them at half-speed is just a menu option away.
  - kleiba 3y ago
    That's a technical solution to a non-technical complaint, though :-)
  - stronglikedan 3y ago
    Unfortunately, all the videos on the landing page are embedded without such controls or links to external players.
  - antifa 3y ago
    YouTube offers 1.25x, but almost always I actually need 1.1x, 1.2x, or 1.3x.
- MalcolmDwyer 3y ago
  I would say it's not your age, but I'm getting old too, so... Anyway, suggestion to the developers: Your intro video needs work. A little context setting would go a long way in those first few examples. Five seconds in and I'm thinking, "wait, what?" Also, the audio sounds very amateur (bad mic in an echoey room).
- dgan 3y ago
  I am not that old and after watching first 14 seconds : i have no idea what's going on Maybe because i don't use spreadsheets in daily job
- StevePerkins 3y ago
  Even slowed down to 0.75x speed, it's like watching a street hustler shuffle three cups around with a little ball underneath one of them. When the narrator says, "It's that easy!", I want to punch them in the face.
sachahjkl 3y ago
how about not using web technologies to make spreadsheet software ?
- bvan 3y ago
  Yes, please.
- dsagal 3y ago
  Incidentally, Grist runs on the desktop (Windows, Mac, Linux), see https://github.com/gristlabs/grist-electron https://github.com/gristlabs/grist-electron.
  - rrdharan 3y ago
    … using web technologies (it’s an Electron app).
- wg0 3y ago
  I think web technologies have gone too far and too mature. The alternatives are not as much portable and approachable for some applications. For instance, Win32 API/Swift UI/GTK would be the surface area for a cross platform application. I am not counting Qt/wxWdigets. You can tell a Qt application from a mile away. And making an application look identical on all platforms is downright impossible. There would be noticeable differences.
  - SoftTalker 3y ago
    An application should not look identical on all platforms. It should instead follow the conventions of the platform.
    - peheje 3y ago
      Never understood this. I own Windows and Mac computers, Apple iPad and Android phone, and annoyed everytime software just doesn't look the same when I switch between platforms. Why must everything look different? That's why I love the web and web applications.
vekker 3y ago
This is not immediately clear to me from the docs alone, but does this sync (in real-time) with a backend and support multi-user (with auth)? Since it stores the data in SQLite, it would be nice to integrate e.g. ElectricSQL to sync with a self-hosted central Postgres db.
- notyoutube 3y ago
  afaiu: * it doesn't sync with anything but has its own data store, built around sqlite, and you can indeed download "documents", which are just sqlite files. (I looked at how they encode summary tables, and it's not as views, so the grist<->sqlite translation is not as shallow/isomorphic as one might hope) * authentication is not taken care of by grist-core itself, but they provide different integration methods (saml, forwarded headers, … ?)
robbiejs 3y ago
Looks like a very complete, well-thought out spreadsheet solution. If anyone is looking for a simpler excel-like data grid component, have a look at DataGridXL (https://datagridxl.com https://datagridxl.com), my product.
- freedomben 3y ago
  Just some advice: If you want to plug your competing stuff on HN without getting down votes, you need to add some actual value in your comment. What makes you think it's well thought out? What do you like about it? What do you not like? What is it missing? How does your product fill that need?
  - robbiejs 3y ago
    Thank you! Will keep that in mind next time
gregwebs 3y ago
This is almost exactly the same as coda.io, which is much more polished, and I highly recommend for small data. Just looking at grist for the first time now it seems like it might not have commenting, which I find very useful sometimes for collaboration. Grist though is open source and seems to have an embeddable version.
- wslh 3y ago
  But, is coda.io open source?
  - mkl 3y ago
    No.
- dsagal 3y ago
  Big differentiators in Grist, in terms of features, are layouts, access rules, and formulas.
  - gregwebs 3y ago
    formulas are a big part of coda and so much easier and safer than excel. I don’t know what layouts and access rules are in grist, but there are similar sounding features in Coda as well.
ljosifov 3y ago
Another data point to the curious case of the unreasonable effectiveness of a 2D rows-columns rectangle of data. Looks like a 2D rows-columns structure is simple enough yet sufficient to cover 1) a matrix, 2) an Excel spreadsheet, 3) an SQL table, 4) a directed graph of nodes and edges.
robertlagrant 3y ago
Just a small comment on your site: it shows examples of legal processes, and HR records, including people's pay. I understand this is just an example, but anyone who wants to actually use it for that is going to want a lot more marketing collateral up front explaining how this very sensitive data is going to be locked down.
- anaisconce 3y ago
  That's a great point. Grist employee here. Grist has access rules which give the document owners the ability to set rules that limit who can see or edit what, down to each table, column, or cell. Rules can be based on user attributes, including attributes defined by the document owner (e.g. roles within a company), and based on values in cells (e.g. if a row's boolean field is true or false).
  - Terretta 3y ago
    Not access controls by the user team governing the team, access controls governing you. For instance, most companies that "take your security very seriously" but also provide support let themselves browse customer data. Here's a strong form to help threat model: are you warrant-proof? If authorities demand customer data, can you give it to them? In general, if the answer is yes, then not just the government warrants but your own insider threat is also a threat to your customers. It may be that self-managed hosting is your answer, with the inevitable "call us" pricing: https://www.getgrist.com/product/self-managed/ https://www.getgrist.com/product/self-managed/ But as most companies will be putting data in a spreadsheet that has laws around it whether they consider themselves "regulated" or not, all firms should be interested in the warrant-proof answer.
    - milkshakes 3y ago
      this is a strange comment on a link to a github repo with extensive documentation, including a dedicated guide on how to set up self hosting: https://support.getgrist.com/self-managed/ https://support.getgrist.com/self-managed/
  - 3y ago
totalhack 3y ago
Would this be embeddable in something like a custom chatgpt-style app? Say I wanted any tabular data that I'm interacting with to be a grist spreadsheet, for example. How many rows can it handle before the browser starts to feel sluggish? And how many grist tables in a single chat would start to cause issues?
spandextwins 3y ago
Now that is something great! I wish more of this kind of stuff existed. Instead of coding I'm writing comments here. I need to get back to writing great code too!
dang 3y ago
Related: Grist – Open core alternative to Airtable and Google Sheets - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30392227 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30392227 - Feb 2022 (107 comments)
db48x 3y ago
Interesting product. The name reminds me of Homestuck, but I don’t see any gushers…
PurpleRamen 3y ago
Last time I tried this some months ago, it looked ok on paper, but a bit off in usage. Something about the interface and feature-set seems to lack polishing for me. It was also annoying that there was no easy way to add custom-widgets, despite having the ability for this. But I'm also no docker-wizard. A bonus was the desktop-app. Having the option to run it offline is a good choice.
superb-owl 3y ago
I've been asking for something like this for a long time! Am I right that everything is stored as-code, and that code and UI live in a 1:1 relationship? Seems like maybe the data and the code are separate? I would _love_ to see (a) version control built in (i.e. a github integration) and (b) support for testing!
- nilespotter 3y ago
  A grist spreadsheet is an sqlite database: $ file 2V3g4e7Xc6SYNPokEP8W5Q.grist 2V3g4e7Xc6SYNPokEP8W5Q.grist: SQLite 3.x database, user version 8, last written using SQLite version 3040000, file counter 6089, database pages 1059, 1st free page 927, free pages 139, cookie 0x355, schema 4, UTF-8, version-valid-for 6089
_boffin_ 3y ago
"Relational" spreadsheet... with v/h/xlookups, it's already relational. That, with dependent lists, there you go.
vviers 3y ago
Happy (self-hosted) Grist user for almost 1.5 years here ! Working for a government agency, self-hosting was an absolute must for my team and we're just loving the product so far — and have been contributing a lot to it in return (they are very serious about really playing the open-source game!) What I love the most is that the way it's build makes it easy for anyone familiar with spreadsheets to get started while making virtually anything possible for a more technical person through custom widgets (basically a web app that integrates with any table and is displayed within Grist) and python formulas !
- stefandesu 3y ago
  Damn, this might be exactly what I've been looking for recently. Excited to try it out! The advanced sharing and permission features sound great. We've been using Nextcloud + OpenOffice for this and apart from being able to lock certain parts of the spreadsheet with a password, it doesn't have any of this.
qubex 3y ago
What I really want is a spreadsheet that separates formulas from data as Lotus Improv did, has a native understanding of tables as Apple Numbers has, and solves circular references as Microsoft Excel does.
- animal_spirits 3y ago
  Apple Numbers has the most potential of any spreadsheet software in my opinion. It is so much easier to use than any of it's competitors, however the features are slow to come.
  - qubex 3y ago
    I agree, I use it intensively and extensively. I really wish it had circular solving functionality, as that is crucial for financial planning (in order to estimate debt on the balance sheet and interest payable on the profit and loss account you have to converge onto a solution), and it simply offers no ability to do that. So many other important features are missing to, from the ability to lock cells or sheets so others can’t mess them up to statistical analysis and plugins. I really adored the old versions that had the sidebar with sheet and table lists. But yeah, it definitely has enormous potential. They just keep adding features that are pretty useless, such as the ability to annotate with a Pencil or various realtime collaboration features. That’s all pretty pointless. They have a potential winner on their hands and they don’t even bother implementing the stuff power users need. Keynote clearly benefitted from Steve’s intensive use of it. Somebody in the C-suite really needs to settle into using Numbers as their main spreadsheet and then growl at developers to implement the features they find themselves wanting.
- WillAdams 3y ago
  Well there's Flexisheet: https://sourceforge.net/projects/flexisheet/ https://sourceforge.net/projects/flexisheet/ but getting it compiled/working is left as an exercise for the reader. I miss it, book, and a bunch of other cool stuff from early Mac OS X days.
- adamrezich 3y ago
  for anyone who hasn't seen Lotus Improv before and is both curious about what it did differently from "standard" 1-2-3/Excel spreadsheet programs and wistfully nostalgic for late 80s/early 90s corporate vibes, check out https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rgGmKD87U3M https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rgGmKD87U3M
emmett 3y ago
Everything old is new again (FoxPro says hi https://www.altap.cz/images/salamander/features/database-viewer.1328628147.png https://www.altap.cz/images/salamander/features/database-vie...)
- speby 3y ago
  This is true except FoxPro really was more of a 'normal' relational database model. It just had this 'tabular' view for its Database Viewer client front-end. FoxPro was certainly not a 'spreadsheet' product in the sense that Excel is.
- aidenn0 3y ago
  FoxPro was bundled with MS Office at one point, and it blew me away with how easy it was to make data-centric apps. It's the only thing I've experienced that comes close to a spreadsheet for enabling programming for those who would identify as non-programmers.
  - Narishma 3y ago
    I think you're confusing it with Access, which is the one that was part of Office for a while.
    - aidenn0 3y ago
      You are right, Foxpro came with Visual Studio, not Office; I had misremembered.
- spandextwins 3y ago
  Oracle says "hi" too! I remember seeing ads in Infoworld for a product called SQL*Calc. As far as I know it was fully vaporware, Oracle never even did anything past a photoshop (or more likely ms-paint) advertisement for it, but somebody on usenet may have used it: https://www.orafaq.com/usenet/comp.databases.oracle.server/2000/01/13/1400.htm https://www.orafaq.com/usenet/comp.databases.oracle.server/2...
creer 3y ago
I'm looking for a "spreadsheet as text files" solution. Something that separates the programming, the data and the visualization. Any pointers? The main reason is being able to see and edit the programming / formulas as overall text, rather than the usual fragmented cell by fragmented cell view. I love named cells and "ranges". I love the concepts of replicating rows or adding a column to a calculation - that's all good. But programming (or editing data) in the small, cell by cell, just doesn't compute. "Notebook"-style programming comes close. Ideally, I'd prefer if the visualization was handled independently - freely choosing the embedded capabilities if any, or the mountains of visualization software that already exists. Improv and Spreadsheet 2000 seem to have gone in that direction - but they are still primarily GUI programs.
- benrutter 3y ago
  A while back [this project (grid studio)](https://github.com/ricklamers/gridstudio https://github.com/ricklamers/gridstudio) looked interesting but I don't think its being maintained. Shame, as I agree that something like that would solve a lot of problems. At the moment, excel and spreadsheet solutions as a whole are so different from any actual programming/data work that goes on, that business logic has to be completely rewritten (e.g.) a team of excel based analysts pass something over to developers to integrate into data pipelines. Would be great if tools kept people at least in the same ballpark.
  - antidnan 3y ago
    Quadratic is pretty similar to Grid studio and still being actively developed (https://www.quadratichq.com/ https://www.quadratichq.com/) But re:parent comment, I'm not sure I understand how you could handle the visualization independently
    - creer 3y ago
      It would not need to be particularly elegant. If the program-spreadsheet exports the right data, it can be rendered or GUI-ed separately - even by a program that watches for export file changes. Even by a spreadsheet viewer for the people who insist. A notebook lets you use various libraries or outside programs to do the rendering.
ollien 3y ago
heh - a bit off topic, but Grist was the first place I ever applied for a software job. I was a high school student looking for a summer internship. I remember bombing that phone interview (I was asked about some JS semantics, and then I badly described what a hash table was). They also had a code challenge that you had to email the output to to some hiring address; was a cool way to do it. Nice to see they're still around, 8 years later.
arilotter 3y ago
oh my god I just spend the last 6 months building something exactly like this as an internal tool because i couldn't find ANYTHING open-source that was remotely powerful enouhh for what i needed. this fits basically every single use case i had, i would only have to write a custom storage format to make data git-trackable. i'm gonna go cry now. please don't tell me this has been out for a while and i missed it.
- Hedepig 3y ago
  From another comment, looks like at least 8 years. Sorry!
nusl 3y ago
I’ve been using Grist for quite some time now. It has its limitations but overall it’s amazing and, for many things, better than Airtable and effectively any competitor. Being able to write Python with their decent docs is also pretty great.
gnarlouse 3y ago
Looks like a neat product, really happy to see it is open source
bartekedgenode 3y ago
Its rare to find a product that is flexible, powerful and well developed. Grist is all of those. There is a lot of resources available so you can move through problems quickly, and on top of that you can connect pretty easily with knowledgeable grist staff to get answers and help. Grist is the best!
sterlinm 3y ago
Would the licensing of Grist allow for building widgets/components to use it in dashboard tools like Streamlit, Jupyter, or Holoviz's Panel? Looks cool!

471 points by protontypes 3y ago

This looks promising! I've been asked a lot about embeding google sheets into websites. Always been using a work around but this seems like it could be pretty special: "to show Grist spreadsheets on a website without any special back-end support, your options include grist-static, a fully in-browser build of Grist. "

protontypes 3y ago
That's exactly why I'm also very interested in using Grist. Embedding spreadsheets into web pages has never satisfied me and has resulted in unacceptable load times.
- melih1im 3y ago
  Embedding spreadsheets especially with iframes seems alien in websites. I've used retable.io feature to get the data in json or html. It works great with wordpress https://go.retable.io/view4dvhJpM6LVTtjBG7/html https://go.retable.io/view4dvhJpM6LVTtjBG7/html

techn00 3y ago

open-core*

sneak 3y ago
Yes; I missed that. Thank you. More free software cosplay. :( > Grist Labs is an open-core company. We offer Grist hosting as a service, with free and paid plans. We also develop and sell features related to Grist using a proprietary license, targeted at the needs of enterprises with large self-managed installations. We see data portability and autonomy as a key value Grist can bring to our users, and grist-core as an essential means to deliver that. We are committed to maintaining and improving the grist-core codebase, and to be thoughtful about how proprietary offerings impact data portability and autonomy.
- notyoutube 3y ago
  I tried the `grist-labs/grist-core` docker install: it's quite easy to set up and most of the useful features are there (I think it's mostly snapshots missing). I don't think "free software cosplay" is totally fair in this case. And compared to the alternatives (nocodb, mathesar, baserow) they seem to provide the best self-hosted/open source solution in terms of polish and features. *Edit* I've been looking for a while for a similar software stack for the organisation of a coop I'm a member of, and have not found anything better as of now, though open to alternatives!
  - paulfitz 3y ago
    Snapshots are there, but you need to configure an s3-like store to enable them, e.g. MinIO (or S3 itself). [Grist employee]
    - vviers 3y ago
      Can confirm that we're self-hosting a couple instances with snapshots enabled (using Scaleway's S3 buckets)
    - notyoutube 3y ago
      Noted, but can't edit my comment. Thanks!
  - sneak 3y ago
    Free software is an ideology based on respect for the four software freedoms. If you run an organization that sells proprietary software that also releases free software, you demonstrably don’t believe in the fundamental importance of the four software freedoms for users, otherwise you wouldn’t use copyright enforcement mechanisms to deny them to your non-customers. It’s like a factory that respects human rights for 95% of its employees; such a factory can’t be said to respect human rights. Microsoft releases a lot of free software, too. This is just a proprietary software vendor that wants to come off as a cool open source company; that’s all open core is: a marketing bullet point. I believe the term “open source cosplay” is appropriate. If you aren’t faking a personal respect for software freedoms, you consequently release 100% of all software you produce as free software. It’s okay to be a proprietary software vendor. Not everyone agrees on the four software freedoms being important. It’s just misleading and inconsistent to brand yourself with the ideology, and then not live up to that.

evan54 3y ago

What are the usecases for non standard spreadsheets? Ie when does one of libre office, google sheets or excel not suffice that people spend time developing a new spreadsheet software? Honest question..

sneak 3y ago
Libreoffice is missing huge swaths of features that Excel has, and isn’t very good. Google Sheet is a cloud service packed with surveillance, not software. Excel is proprietary and expensive and has invasive spyware. There is definitely a market for a good free software featureful spreadsheet tool.
- pbhjpbhj 3y ago
  What would you say the most important [to you] features are that LO is missing?
  - atoav 3y ago
    I am curious about that as well, because I heard that one often and whenever I ask: "Like what?" it is either some obscure function that you could build yourself with a few lines or it is crickets and a: "Don't know, I just like it better". Note: I am not saying there are no true and valid differences one or another person could really rely on. But having worked in IT-support I know that not few people like to give pseudo-rational reasons, when in fact it is often more about feelings. I don't say that feelings/look/design is irrelevant: "I like the design of Excel more", is a totally valid reason for choosing it over Libreoffice. But in the end many people pretend there is more to it. I have yet to encounter a situation that I couldn't resolve using Libreoffice Calcs features (ignoring insane scenarios where writing a well tested script or using an actual database would be the rational option).
    - 2pie 3y ago
      I would make a difference between "design" and "a lot of small and convenient functionalities that makes your life easier". People prefer gsheet to calc not because of one big missing functionality, because as you say, you can always find a way. It's more that excel/gsheet makes your life way easier, and saves you a lot of time. I use both gsheet (for work) and calc (for personal stuff). I really want to give calc a chance so I accept the excess time it takes me to use it, but I understand that some people don't. And I would not say that it's related to "feelings", it's more a problem of "ease of use" and "doing things fast".

melesian 3y ago

I help run a small non-profit that has managed data in a number of spreadsheets. Grist made it v simple to pull the data into a web site linking it together with a variety of different scrollable views. Came across it while looking for lo- and no-code solutions and quickly stopped looking. It was just the ticket.

notyoutube 3y ago
Could you expand on how the linking is done: * Are you self-hosting? * What auth method are you using? * How is the linking done? I presume API (or are you just using widgets?), but that means you need users to copy/paste their API key by hand? Thanks!
- melesian 3y ago
  Not self-hosting. Linking by identifying key fields. Currently just using password login.

wood_spirit 3y ago

I always get excited about these databases-that-look-like-spreadsheets and then get frustrated when they stop me doing spreadsheety things. I want it to work the other way around: a spreadsheet with more databasy features I can choose to use: In the same way that the chart wizard can do a good job of spotting the “table” of data that the current cell is in, the spreadsheet could auto-detect natural tables and make it easy to create and manage named ranges etc. And then allow formulas to offer better ergonomics than vlookup etc and even allow sql etc? Things like allowing column widths to change for different rows in the same column etc would also be awesome. And offering an insert-column that automatically only inserts for the current table etc.

pbhjpbhj 3y ago
Yes, what I'd want is like a Jupyter notebook for spreadsheets. Drag a box to define a new table, intersperse whitespace with text/images/graphs/formulae (two cells) that aren't locked to a grid based on a upper-left table. Auto-recognise the first line in a table as a title, second line as column headings. LibreOffice already allows SQL on spreadsheets; but SQL formulae would be cool.
- alexmojaki 3y ago
  You can embed an integrated Jupyter notebook into a Grist spreadsheet: https://github.com/gristlabs/jupyterlite-widget/blob/main/USAGE.md https://github.com/gristlabs/jupyterlite-widget/blob/main/US...
- FredPret 3y ago
  I think Apple Numbers work like this
twelvechairs 3y ago
Yes the joy of a spreadsheet is the blank slate - you can just start writing random things in random boxes. What I'd like is something you can do both. Start writing random things but then slowly formalise - define columns as specific types for consistency etc. And if you do this enough end up with a structured database. But not force only one or the other

ale42 3y ago

... another Electron app? :-(

maxloh 3y ago
~99% of third party native apps are ugly. :-(
lordofgibbons 3y ago
Honest question since I see a lot of similar comments on HN: Would you rather not have this application exist at all? Because doing this with native UI frameworks is such a massively larger amount of work, it's not even comparable. Speaking from not-so-fond memories of working with Qt..
- Alifatisk 3y ago
  See it this way No application < Electron < Native app
- nvella 3y ago
  From lived experience, creating a cross-platform application via abstracting the relevant native interfaces versus targeting web with all the _fun_ that entails are effectively equal levels of pain. Developing rich web apps isn’t free either; I needn’t go into the issues surrounding the revolving door of frameworks, contrived state management patterns that seem to change every year, the total lack of standard controls outside of built-in web elements that look awful which inevitably means that at some point, _you will_ have to be doing DOM manipulation for something that is otherwise built-in on an OS’s native toolkit, etc etc. And then when you put all of this together, you add yet another 500MB Chromium instance onto your user’s desktop and the thing feels like a social networking app. I’m not going to pretend that there’s currently a better solution because for the current set of constraints everything sucks. .NET has a few up-and-coming frameworks for cross-platform UI but nothing mature like WPF was. Java still produces noticeably slow applications. React Native could perhaps get part of the way there, but as far as I’m aware that mostly targets mobile.
  - 3y ago

kleiba 3y ago

Another sign that I'm getting old: the editing of the video is way too fast-paced for me to understand anything what's going on. :(

fragmede 3y ago
The corollary of YouTube/VLC/other programs being able to play videos back at 1.5x speed is that slowing videos down and playing them at half-speed is just a menu option away.
- kleiba 3y ago
  That's a technical solution to a non-technical complaint, though :-)
- stronglikedan 3y ago
  Unfortunately, all the videos on the landing page are embedded without such controls or links to external players.
- antifa 3y ago
  YouTube offers 1.25x, but almost always I actually need 1.1x, 1.2x, or 1.3x.
MalcolmDwyer 3y ago
I would say it's not your age, but I'm getting old too, so... Anyway, suggestion to the developers: Your intro video needs work. A little context setting would go a long way in those first few examples. Five seconds in and I'm thinking, "wait, what?" Also, the audio sounds very amateur (bad mic in an echoey room).
dgan 3y ago
I am not that old and after watching first 14 seconds : i have no idea what's going on Maybe because i don't use spreadsheets in daily job
StevePerkins 3y ago
Even slowed down to 0.75x speed, it's like watching a street hustler shuffle three cups around with a little ball underneath one of them. When the narrator says, "It's that easy!", I want to punch them in the face.

sachahjkl 3y ago

how about not using web technologies to make spreadsheet software ?

bvan 3y ago
Yes, please.
dsagal 3y ago
Incidentally, Grist runs on the desktop (Windows, Mac, Linux), see https://github.com/gristlabs/grist-electron https://github.com/gristlabs/grist-electron.
- rrdharan 3y ago
  … using web technologies (it’s an Electron app).
wg0 3y ago
I think web technologies have gone too far and too mature. The alternatives are not as much portable and approachable for some applications. For instance, Win32 API/Swift UI/GTK would be the surface area for a cross platform application. I am not counting Qt/wxWdigets. You can tell a Qt application from a mile away. And making an application look identical on all platforms is downright impossible. There would be noticeable differences.
- SoftTalker 3y ago
  An application should not look identical on all platforms. It should instead follow the conventions of the platform.
  - peheje 3y ago
    Never understood this. I own Windows and Mac computers, Apple iPad and Android phone, and annoyed everytime software just doesn't look the same when I switch between platforms. Why must everything look different? That's why I love the web and web applications.

vekker 3y ago

This is not immediately clear to me from the docs alone, but does this sync (in real-time) with a backend and support multi-user (with auth)? Since it stores the data in SQLite, it would be nice to integrate e.g. ElectricSQL to sync with a self-hosted central Postgres db.

notyoutube 3y ago
afaiu: * it doesn't sync with anything but has its own data store, built around sqlite, and you can indeed download "documents", which are just sqlite files. (I looked at how they encode summary tables, and it's not as views, so the grist<->sqlite translation is not as shallow/isomorphic as one might hope) * authentication is not taken care of by grist-core itself, but they provide different integration methods (saml, forwarded headers, … ?)

robbiejs 3y ago

Looks like a very complete, well-thought out spreadsheet solution. If anyone is looking for a simpler excel-like data grid component, have a look at DataGridXL (https://datagridxl.com https://datagridxl.com), my product.

freedomben 3y ago
Just some advice: If you want to plug your competing stuff on HN without getting down votes, you need to add some actual value in your comment. What makes you think it's well thought out? What do you like about it? What do you not like? What is it missing? How does your product fill that need?
- robbiejs 3y ago
  Thank you! Will keep that in mind next time

gregwebs 3y ago

This is almost exactly the same as coda.io, which is much more polished, and I highly recommend for small data. Just looking at grist for the first time now it seems like it might not have commenting, which I find very useful sometimes for collaboration. Grist though is open source and seems to have an embeddable version.

wslh 3y ago
But, is coda.io open source?
- mkl 3y ago
  No.
dsagal 3y ago
Big differentiators in Grist, in terms of features, are layouts, access rules, and formulas.
- gregwebs 3y ago
  formulas are a big part of coda and so much easier and safer than excel. I don’t know what layouts and access rules are in grist, but there are similar sounding features in Coda as well.

ljosifov 3y ago

Another data point to the curious case of the unreasonable effectiveness of a 2D rows-columns rectangle of data. Looks like a 2D rows-columns structure is simple enough yet sufficient to cover 1) a matrix, 2) an Excel spreadsheet, 3) an SQL table, 4) a directed graph of nodes and edges.

robertlagrant 3y ago

Just a small comment on your site: it shows examples of legal processes, and HR records, including people's pay. I understand this is just an example, but anyone who wants to actually use it for that is going to want a lot more marketing collateral up front explaining how this very sensitive data is going to be locked down.

anaisconce 3y ago
That's a great point. Grist employee here. Grist has access rules which give the document owners the ability to set rules that limit who can see or edit what, down to each table, column, or cell. Rules can be based on user attributes, including attributes defined by the document owner (e.g. roles within a company), and based on values in cells (e.g. if a row's boolean field is true or false).
- Terretta 3y ago
  Not access controls by the user team governing the team, access controls governing you. For instance, most companies that "take your security very seriously" but also provide support let themselves browse customer data. Here's a strong form to help threat model: are you warrant-proof? If authorities demand customer data, can you give it to them? In general, if the answer is yes, then not just the government warrants but your own insider threat is also a threat to your customers. It may be that self-managed hosting is your answer, with the inevitable "call us" pricing: https://www.getgrist.com/product/self-managed/ https://www.getgrist.com/product/self-managed/ But as most companies will be putting data in a spreadsheet that has laws around it whether they consider themselves "regulated" or not, all firms should be interested in the warrant-proof answer.
  - milkshakes 3y ago
    this is a strange comment on a link to a github repo with extensive documentation, including a dedicated guide on how to set up self hosting: https://support.getgrist.com/self-managed/ https://support.getgrist.com/self-managed/
- 3y ago

totalhack 3y ago

Would this be embeddable in something like a custom chatgpt-style app? Say I wanted any tabular data that I'm interacting with to be a grist spreadsheet, for example. How many rows can it handle before the browser starts to feel sluggish? And how many grist tables in a single chat would start to cause issues?

spandextwins 3y ago

Now that is something great! I wish more of this kind of stuff existed. Instead of coding I'm writing comments here. I need to get back to writing great code too!

dang 3y ago

Related: Grist – Open core alternative to Airtable and Google Sheets - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30392227 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30392227 - Feb 2022 (107 comments)

db48x 3y ago

Interesting product. The name reminds me of Homestuck, but I don’t see any gushers…

PurpleRamen 3y ago

Last time I tried this some months ago, it looked ok on paper, but a bit off in usage. Something about the interface and feature-set seems to lack polishing for me. It was also annoying that there was no easy way to add custom-widgets, despite having the ability for this. But I'm also no docker-wizard. A bonus was the desktop-app. Having the option to run it offline is a good choice.

superb-owl 3y ago

I've been asking for something like this for a long time! Am I right that everything is stored as-code, and that code and UI live in a 1:1 relationship? Seems like maybe the data and the code are separate? I would _love_ to see (a) version control built in (i.e. a github integration) and (b) support for testing!

nilespotter 3y ago
A grist spreadsheet is an sqlite database: $ file 2V3g4e7Xc6SYNPokEP8W5Q.grist 2V3g4e7Xc6SYNPokEP8W5Q.grist: SQLite 3.x database, user version 8, last written using SQLite version 3040000, file counter 6089, database pages 1059, 1st free page 927, free pages 139, cookie 0x355, schema 4, UTF-8, version-valid-for 6089

_boffin_ 3y ago

"Relational" spreadsheet... with v/h/xlookups, it's already relational. That, with dependent lists, there you go.

vviers 3y ago

Happy (self-hosted) Grist user for almost 1.5 years here ! Working for a government agency, self-hosting was an absolute must for my team and we're just loving the product so far — and have been contributing a lot to it in return (they are very serious about really playing the open-source game!) What I love the most is that the way it's build makes it easy for anyone familiar with spreadsheets to get started while making virtually anything possible for a more technical person through custom widgets (basically a web app that integrates with any table and is displayed within Grist) and python formulas !

stefandesu 3y ago
Damn, this might be exactly what I've been looking for recently. Excited to try it out! The advanced sharing and permission features sound great. We've been using Nextcloud + OpenOffice for this and apart from being able to lock certain parts of the spreadsheet with a password, it doesn't have any of this.

qubex 3y ago

What I really want is a spreadsheet that separates formulas from data as Lotus Improv did, has a native understanding of tables as Apple Numbers has, and solves circular references as Microsoft Excel does.

animal_spirits 3y ago
Apple Numbers has the most potential of any spreadsheet software in my opinion. It is so much easier to use than any of it's competitors, however the features are slow to come.
- qubex 3y ago
  I agree, I use it intensively and extensively. I really wish it had circular solving functionality, as that is crucial for financial planning (in order to estimate debt on the balance sheet and interest payable on the profit and loss account you have to converge onto a solution), and it simply offers no ability to do that. So many other important features are missing to, from the ability to lock cells or sheets so others can’t mess them up to statistical analysis and plugins. I really adored the old versions that had the sidebar with sheet and table lists. But yeah, it definitely has enormous potential. They just keep adding features that are pretty useless, such as the ability to annotate with a Pencil or various realtime collaboration features. That’s all pretty pointless. They have a potential winner on their hands and they don’t even bother implementing the stuff power users need. Keynote clearly benefitted from Steve’s intensive use of it. Somebody in the C-suite really needs to settle into using Numbers as their main spreadsheet and then growl at developers to implement the features they find themselves wanting.
WillAdams 3y ago
Well there's Flexisheet: https://sourceforge.net/projects/flexisheet/ https://sourceforge.net/projects/flexisheet/ but getting it compiled/working is left as an exercise for the reader. I miss it, book, and a bunch of other cool stuff from early Mac OS X days.
adamrezich 3y ago
for anyone who hasn't seen Lotus Improv before and is both curious about what it did differently from "standard" 1-2-3/Excel spreadsheet programs and wistfully nostalgic for late 80s/early 90s corporate vibes, check out https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rgGmKD87U3M https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rgGmKD87U3M

emmett 3y ago

Everything old is new again (FoxPro says hi https://www.altap.cz/images/salamander/features/database-viewer.1328628147.png https://www.altap.cz/images/salamander/features/database-vie...)

speby 3y ago
This is true except FoxPro really was more of a 'normal' relational database model. It just had this 'tabular' view for its Database Viewer client front-end. FoxPro was certainly not a 'spreadsheet' product in the sense that Excel is.
aidenn0 3y ago
FoxPro was bundled with MS Office at one point, and it blew me away with how easy it was to make data-centric apps. It's the only thing I've experienced that comes close to a spreadsheet for enabling programming for those who would identify as non-programmers.
- Narishma 3y ago
  I think you're confusing it with Access, which is the one that was part of Office for a while.
  - aidenn0 3y ago
    You are right, Foxpro came with Visual Studio, not Office; I had misremembered.
spandextwins 3y ago
Oracle says "hi" too! I remember seeing ads in Infoworld for a product called SQL*Calc. As far as I know it was fully vaporware, Oracle never even did anything past a photoshop (or more likely ms-paint) advertisement for it, but somebody on usenet may have used it: https://www.orafaq.com/usenet/comp.databases.oracle.server/2000/01/13/1400.htm https://www.orafaq.com/usenet/comp.databases.oracle.server/2...

creer 3y ago

I'm looking for a "spreadsheet as text files" solution. Something that separates the programming, the data and the visualization. Any pointers? The main reason is being able to see and edit the programming / formulas as overall text, rather than the usual fragmented cell by fragmented cell view. I love named cells and "ranges". I love the concepts of replicating rows or adding a column to a calculation - that's all good. But programming (or editing data) in the small, cell by cell, just doesn't compute. "Notebook"-style programming comes close. Ideally, I'd prefer if the visualization was handled independently - freely choosing the embedded capabilities if any, or the mountains of visualization software that already exists. Improv and Spreadsheet 2000 seem to have gone in that direction - but they are still primarily GUI programs.

benrutter 3y ago
A while back [this project (grid studio)](https://github.com/ricklamers/gridstudio https://github.com/ricklamers/gridstudio) looked interesting but I don't think its being maintained. Shame, as I agree that something like that would solve a lot of problems. At the moment, excel and spreadsheet solutions as a whole are so different from any actual programming/data work that goes on, that business logic has to be completely rewritten (e.g.) a team of excel based analysts pass something over to developers to integrate into data pipelines. Would be great if tools kept people at least in the same ballpark.
- antidnan 3y ago
  Quadratic is pretty similar to Grid studio and still being actively developed (https://www.quadratichq.com/ https://www.quadratichq.com/) But re:parent comment, I'm not sure I understand how you could handle the visualization independently
  - creer 3y ago
    It would not need to be particularly elegant. If the program-spreadsheet exports the right data, it can be rendered or GUI-ed separately - even by a program that watches for export file changes. Even by a spreadsheet viewer for the people who insist. A notebook lets you use various libraries or outside programs to do the rendering.

ollien 3y ago

heh - a bit off topic, but Grist was the first place I ever applied for a software job. I was a high school student looking for a summer internship. I remember bombing that phone interview (I was asked about some JS semantics, and then I badly described what a hash table was). They also had a code challenge that you had to email the output to to some hiring address; was a cool way to do it. Nice to see they're still around, 8 years later.

arilotter 3y ago

oh my god I just spend the last 6 months building something exactly like this as an internal tool because i couldn't find ANYTHING open-source that was remotely powerful enouhh for what i needed. this fits basically every single use case i had, i would only have to write a custom storage format to make data git-trackable. i'm gonna go cry now. please don't tell me this has been out for a while and i missed it.

Hedepig 3y ago
From another comment, looks like at least 8 years. Sorry!

nusl 3y ago

I’ve been using Grist for quite some time now. It has its limitations but overall it’s amazing and, for many things, better than Airtable and effectively any competitor. Being able to write Python with their decent docs is also pretty great.

gnarlouse 3y ago

Looks like a neat product, really happy to see it is open source

bartekedgenode 3y ago

Its rare to find a product that is flexible, powerful and well developed. Grist is all of those. There is a lot of resources available so you can move through problems quickly, and on top of that you can connect pretty easily with knowledgeable grist staff to get answers and help. Grist is the best!

sterlinm 3y ago

Would the licensing of Grist allow for building widgets/components to use it in dashboard tools like Streamlit, Jupyter, or Holoviz's Panel? Looks cool!