Is this a spreadsheets renaissance? Or are spreadsheets just another beneficiary of the no-code movement.
Regardless, beyond the haters but before the people with the “I heart spreadsheets” mugs, is a growing population of inbetweeners. Marketers, small business owners, and beyond may not know how to code, but they do feel proficient enough with integrations and no-code builders to create tools that work for their specific needs. Still, they haven’t been able to quit Excel for good. Perhaps new products will change that.
“The world runs on spreadsheets, but the last time they got a major update was in 2006,” wrote Rows co-founder Humberto Ayres Pereira.
Rows (formerly dashdash) launched earlier this month, a year after opening its public beta. Rows' “spreadsheet superpowers” include interactive elements (buttons, input fields), sharing (without letting others mess up your formulas), automated reports, integrations with tools like Google Analytics and Crunchbase, and the ability to connect custom APIs.
Back in July, Spreadsheet.com opened up its beta to allow more people to try its “all-in-one spreadsheet” solution. Put simply, it works like the Excel you know (and maybe love) but adds a “whole new set of capabilities that give it the power of a database and project management system.” This includes rich data types, file attachments in cells, connected worksheets, Kanbans, Gantts, and more (of the spreadsheet tools here today, this one feels the most like a direct Airtable competitor).
Grist launched its relational spreadsheets product last month. The tool lets you do things like link records across tables, drag-and-drop your data, and more. Some commenters shared that they saw Grist as “the only viable alternative to Airable,” but a note by co-founder Dmitry Sagalovskiy’s best explains Grist’s approach to the market. While Airtable would be best be described as a relational database, the makers built Grist so that it’s easy to start with just a spreadsheet.
“You can start building a spreadsheet, and end up with a proper relational database and a versatile custom application, all in one.”
Rows is also pretty unconcerned with comparisons to software in this close quarters, from Airtable to Zapier and Notion. Ayres Pereira told TechCrunch: “Yes, we overlap… but I’d say we are friends. We’re all raising awareness about people being able to do more and not having to be stuck using old tools. It’s not a zero-sum game for us.”
The team at Tackle has hackathon-ed a fun Year in Review report that almost makes all those could-have-been-an-email calls worth it.
Connect your Gcal to get stats, like hours spent in meetings and how many new people you met with over the year.
Since “stats are sometimes dull [the team] wrapped it around a space flight 🚀, Jeff Bezos style.”
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Stenography is a new plain English codebase documenter that uses AI (via Codex) and code parsing techniques. Maker Bram Adams created Stenography to decrease developers’ cognitive load.
Adams explained the parser layer of the product finds sufficiently complex code blocks “us[ing] my and other developer's expertise in their native coding language… to determine where the RIGHT code is for the AI to step in,” while the explanation layer approaches the best way to describe explain the code.