[serjester]

Am I missing something? I used to run a fairly large landscaping company with a partner out of gSheets so I was excited when I saw this. But at the moment this just seems like a wrapper that takes away most of the useful functionality of a spreadsheet. I could see something like this being great if it had integrations with payroll, accounting, etc software but it currently seems far too basic to be usable.

[tyingq]

That seems to be on purpose. They are using the sheet as a database, and abstracting all but the "admin" away from direct access.

Using sheets for the back-end is unusual, but otherwise it's the same space as Knack, Quickbase, Zoho Creator, etc. They are all pretty popular.

[denster]

I'm biased [1], but agree with serjester -- the spreadsheet needs to be a part of the application authoring process.

For data access, a tool like this needs to support:

- lightweight: the spreadsheet itself

- medium-weight: a built-in set of functions for storing/fetching data (from a built-in, behind-the-scenes DB)

- heavyweight: functions for accessing data in an existing corporate DB, queue (Kafka, JMS, etc), and other sources in real-time

[1] Founder of https://mintdata.com, where we think spreadsheets have a bright future in this space :)

[fragmede]

What definition of "real-time" are you using here? I presume you're not using the RTOS[] definition, so I'm just curious what workload you would consider "heavyweight" and what kind of real time guarantees that means the ideal system would have.

[] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Real-time_operating_system