[uptown]

I built a site for a restaurant and use a Google Spreadsheet as the back-end for menu data. Whenever they have a change to make, they modify the spreadsheet, and the updates are instantly live on the site.

They like it because they're very non-technical people, but totally get spreadsheets. I like it because there's version-control on any changes to the spreadsheet, so tracking updates is easy. Everything is cached in-case Google'd data were to ever be inaccessible, but it's a system that was easy to implement, and has worked well for a couple years without any perceivable negatives.

[cpeterso]

I am using Google Spreadsheet as a simple back-end just using client-side JS (on a website to track testing of Firefox add-ons). I've been meaning to write a blog post about this because the existing blog posts I read each missed some details about parsing the spreadsheet data or accessing different spreadsheet tabs.

1. My data is on this spreadsheet: https://docs.google.com/a/mozilla.com/spreadsheets/d/1CXdwQq...

2. I load the spreadsheet's tab "1816064743" as XML: https://github.com/cpeterso/arewee10syet/blob/master/index.h...

3. Then parse the spreadsheet rows and columns here: https://github.com/cpeterso/arewee10syet/blob/master/js/gdat...

4. And display the pretty results on my website: http://arewee10syet.com/

[giovannibajo1]

Agreed. We also use Spreadsheet as a zero-code backoffice interface for data entry in enterprise companies and they love it. You can even embed specific sheets on your website if you want, so they don't even have to leave the site.

[aendruk]

> They like it because they're very non-technical people, but totally get spreadsheets.

My experience matches this. About a year ago I rigged up Google Spreadsheets as a data source for Middleman in order to streamline content updates from the client throughout development. I learned the hard way to use fuzzy matching when correlating client-editable record names between data sources, but it otherwise worked well for both of us.

[livestyle]

Agreed. The use case really addresses the Job a client hires a CMS to do.

I like it so much I submitted it to ProductHunt -> http://www.producthunt.com/posts/data-by-brace