[Ajedi32]

I've long wondered why there's not a more incremental transition path from spreadsheets to a full blown database with a custom UI. It just seems like spreadsheets are right on the cusp of being able to fill that that role but lack just a few key features which might make it viable (structured data, native SQL query support, custom UI elements, IDE integration, etc).

[breadwinner]

> incremental transition path from spreadsheets to a full blown database

There are plenty of tools for that. Airtable comes to mind, or if you want to use your own database try: https://visualdb.com/

[1-more]

At my old gig, all of our content generation was in Google sheets or Airtable.

Anything we made would have _never_ been as good a UI and would have stopped us from being able to publish new content. The other nice thing about them is you can scale the integration effort. You can download a sheet from GS as a CSV then upload that in an admin page and you can probably ship that feature today. A tiny bit more effort and you can add a 3rd dimension to the data by finding an XSLX library and exporting the page as an Excel workbook. Eventually you can do something with their API where you just click "reload data from the master sheet" and you can generate all the data you need to preview the changes on the frontend. That's what our Airtable integration looked like. Airtable was very "pull this in via API" native and had a better way of expressing higher dimensional data in cells which matched nicely with Postgres storing arrays in cells.

[cassepipe]

Btw, anyone ever used Mathesar ? I saw it on the hn frontpage but I haven't tried it yet