Grist is a modern, relational spreadsheet

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.

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.

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.

In fact with a passing familiarity of AirTable I immediately understand it but I think it's probably the intended audience...

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).

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

And:

I must be getting old.. at the end of the video the narrator says, "and a hell of a lot more!" and I thought that was pretty crass.

I am young and it was too fast for me too

It was the annoying feel good backing music that got me.

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).

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!

[Grist founder here] On separating formulas from data, that's always been an important part of Grist.

In Grist, check out the "Code View" page in the left-side panel -- it shows all the logic (i.e. formulas) of the document along with the Python data model (i.e. all the column names and types).

Also, you can save or download a copy of the document without the data, but keeping all the formulas. So you can get all the logic (and formatting, layouts, etc), and use it for different data.

(No support for solving circular references though.)

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.

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

Well there's 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.

Grist is more like Airtable, a spreadsheet/database hybrid.

Regular spreadsheets give you a number of independently configured cells, which gives you maximum flexibility, but becomes inconvenient when you want tables instead: have a fixed structure, enforce column types and validations, implement row-level access control, or join them together.

You can say it’s a type of no-code tool, enabling you to build a CRUD app with a spreadsheet-like interface. Their website even features demos like “lightweight CRM” and “class enrollment”.

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.

I dislike the UX of Libre Office (the way it scrolls alone drives me mad) and Excel and Google Sheets are proprietary and SaaS-y.

One thing that actually has pretty great UX is Apple's Pages (mainly the concept of fine-grained table creation), I'd love it if someone copied that.

There aren't many reasons to create a freeform spreadsheet editor to compete with Excel or gsheet as standalone applications.

The two areas where it makes sense to compete are:

a) Embedding a spreadsheet like (to varying levels of featurefullness) interfaces into other applications or workflows. A minimal feature set probably doesn't even involve formulas, just the UI affordances of a typical spreadsheet (ie it needs to copy and paste like a spreadsheet).

b) You are building something that acts like ms access (or airtable), just aiming for different blends of functionality/freeformness/end user fiddliness.

Sometimes you want something cloudy but you want to keep all the data inhouse. Sometimes you want to integrate it into a product offering. You want to use a tablet as a spreadsheet monitoring machine.

Wow! You got a lot of responses!

For me I think it's just the sheer time investment, personally. Spreadsheets give a very easy programming language, no compiler, via Google sheets my phone can run it and my browser can run at and I can link it to someone... All great pros! But then it takes so long to be effective with them.

Give you an example of the last big app that I wrote for a spreadsheet: I have a 2-year-old, she was born a bit underweight with lip/tongue ties that gave her trouble latching, so we chose to do a hybrid breastfeeding/formula approach; we'd use bottles of pumped milk where we could, but if she was too frustrated to latch and we'd already used up the pumped milk we'd break out the baby formula.

But, we knew this was a risk: milk production is in response to demand, when it goes dry you activate more tissues that make more milk later. So I wanted to be able to answer my wife's questions of “is my milk supply getting stronger or drying up, what percentage of her diet was formula, etc.” and my own questions of “did I enter all of yesterday's stuff properly?”

So the spreadsheet is, a Google Form first dumps {

    timestamp: date
    what: enum('milk', 'formula')
    from: enum('mama', 'enfamil', 'costco', 'bottle', 'freezer')
    to: enum('waste', 'kid', 'bottle', 'freezer')
    oz: decimal
    when: nullable(date)

    rowID: number
    effectiveDate: date
    check: boolean

These then get sorted on a following page and chunked by day. Another page allows me to track “how much milk is currently in bottles, how much formula is currently in bottles, how much milk is in the freezer," and an enhanced version on the next page shows me all of the account balances by date. Why these? So that I can answer “did I forget to input some of this milk/formula in my sleep addled state?”. A lot of this tracking was done by using my phone to just take a picture of an amount in a bottle and then piece together what had happened that day later. So it had to be checkable, “this says I have X ounces in the fridge, do I have that?”

The next page just has plain text, these are derivations of mathematical formulas, explanations of the modeling I wanted to do, thinking out loud so that the formula is showing up on the next page are not out of context when I later go to change them.

From the daily balances finally we get the models. Some ways I do this are to use a binomial distribution to smooth the data that I've got, with noisy data that can be a little bit easier than independent data points. I also tried some autoregression modeling to try and predict, with error bars, “today, tomorrow, the day after” for the binomial smoothing. I wanted to do this for three series which ended up being "total fluids kid has consumed, total milk pumped into either bottles or freezer bags, and formula: consumed milk ratio.” but this required a lot of iteration over different things that I might have wanted to try to graph before I could answer the questions that I really wanted to.

So I then like to plot line graphs where the data points are little X's, there are two dotted fit lines, one with the error from the model added, the other with the error from the model subtracted, so you get this kind of snake of error envelope that is just a running average in the middle but “opens its mouth” at the end, so that I am not telling a story that is not supported by the error bars given only the past couple days' data. If the entire snakehead is pointing up then yes, “your supply looks to be getting stronger this week!” but otherwise “it's still a bit early to say but here's what the story was three or four days ago.”

When I describe this to you it doesn't sound like a very complicated app, right? But writing it in a spreadsheet, which I needed so that I could input data or correct it from my phone at 3am, made this a very slow process, hours and hours were sunk into this tracking spreadsheets to get them where I needed them to be. And that's the big problem is that spreadsheets are kind of an “assembly language” level of solution where you have individual cells/registers that you have to track and update and coordinate, but the system doesn't connect everything together semantically so you have to express every single relationship yourself and then auto fill columns and whatever else to make it work.

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.

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.

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/2...

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.

From another comment, looks like at least 8 years. Sorry!