[arnihermann]

> You seem to have thought of a solution but not a problem. What problem would this solve?

For the people I've talked with so far, it means 1) they don't have to re-implement the spreadsheet logic in their server, and 2) whenever the spreadsheet is updated (either Google sheet edit, or an Excel file is uploaded again) the API is automatically up to date.

Some of these people are already creating GRID documents backed by their existing spreadsheets, and have a use case to make an API call from their own systems to perform a computation that already lives in the spreadsheet.

Notice I'm not talking about writing data to the spreadsheet and using it as a database. I'm talking about reading values from a spreadsheet model through a queryable API. Not sure how AirTable and DataTables compare – will have to look into that.

[smt88]

> I'm talking about reading values from a spreadsheet model through a queryable API.

OK, I understand now.

There are an absolute ton of these products already. AirTable is the most famous, but Google and Microsoft also have official web APIs that do the same thing.

https://duckduckgo.com/?q=use+spreadsheet+as+api