Recently, a startup SheetUI joined Show HN. This is a service that takes your table, parses it, and generates a static page with a set of cards. The creators have big ambitions, but so far many important functions have not been implemented.
What is it for?
In a comment on HN, the developer tjchear said that he had a request from Google Spreadsheets users to quickly and automatically render their spreadsheets. SheetUI was invented as an answer to it. You just need to provide a link to the table, mark up the card fields in a couple of clicks, and that's it - the service will provide a link to the generated page. It is rendered in React using Material-UI.
The site sheetui.com following yuzkeysy listed:
- Product catalog - a huge part of small businesses use Excel or Google Sheets instead of a catalog. The service is supposed to automatically generate a list of products with pictures, prices and buttons.
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Let's say you have such a table in Google Sheets:
To make a list of clickable server cards out of it, you need to publish it via File> Publish to the Internet, as in the video above, and make it available via the link. This sharing link needs to be pasted on sheetui.com/edit/0 and select the sheet sequence number.
We will be prompted to fill in the title (pulled from the title of the sheet by default) and the subheading and choose a layout - list, grid or responsive grid. In the vast majority of cases, the latter option will do. Then we select the type of card:
- Simple Card is a text card with four fields (pretitle, title, subtitle and description) and two buttons (disabled by default, appear when filling in the fields).
- Media Card - image with three fields, address, alt-text and height, title, subtitle, description, two regular buttons and buttons with social media icons to choose from.
- Media Card 2 - similar to the previous one, but the picture is displayed on the left, not on top, and there are no social buttons.
- Image Tile is just an image with optional text on a semi-transparent plate below.
Simple Card
Set up the fields and click Finish, we get a link to the following page:
link
More examples
Media Card , Image Tile
Minuses
- It's not safe. Published tables and documents are regularly leaked to the network, so you cannot use this service for important data under any pretext. The developers are looking at integration with the Google API, we are waiting.
- The cards have a fixed number of fields, you cannot add your own. You can add multiple cells to one field, as in the screenshot above, but you won't be able to add more than two text buttons.
- The service generates links on its domain and does not give files to the self-hosted yet. But they promise to finish this functionality.
- The design is always the same, there is no theme or custom css. Should be decided together with the previous paragraph
- The generated links are unrealistically long, they will also be fixed.
Outcome
SheetUI has many weaknesses, but they all need to be fixed in the future. The service is under development, and so far we see, in fact, a demo. The idea behind the project is not new, but there are still no really convenient and flexible solutions on the market, so SheetUI has every chance to shoot.
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