Ask HN: Slap Excel in a Server?
I'm a developer at GRID [1]. GRID turns spreadsheets into interactive web documents, and we recently built a system which allows our users to effectively turn their spreadsheets into a web service and query it via a JSON API.
I recently tweeted [2], asking if some of my friends had ever re-implemented spreadsheet logic in code or otherwise wished they could've accessed spreadsheet values through an API. A few reached out and now I want to get a broader look at the problem we're solving.
To clarify what I mean by turning a spreadsheet into an API, let's take for example this Dog age calculator [3]. There's an underlying spreadsheet behind this web page with all the formulas for the calculator. Here's an example of how we can use our API to find out the dog age of a large 8 year old dog:
$ curl 'https://thesystem.grid.is/@grid_examples/dog-age-calculator-Yjk:Fsm0Rj2mtJVcKqzr7g' -d '{
"read": [ "J3" ],
"override": {
"G3": 8
}
}'
{
"data": {
"J3": {"value": 55}
}
}
So my ask is this: Does HN relate? Do you ever wish you were able to turn a spreadsheet into an API instead of re-implementing it in code – and then query it from your server (or JS in browser)? Does the API make sense to you and do you think it would be useful? If not, how could we improve it?
Would love to hear your thoughts. Also, let me know if you’d like to try it out – we’re looking for a few users to give us feedback on the API itself.
[1]: https://grid.is
[2]: https://twitter.com/arnihermann/status/1425116225986834435
[3]: https://grid.is/@grid_examples/dog-age-calculator-Yjk:Fsm0Rj2mtJVcKqzr7g No, it makes no sense. There are libraries like DataTables in .NET that do this far more robustly than you could. You could also get the full power of Excel as an API via Office's or Google's spreadsheet APIs. There are also things like AirTable that overlap as well. You seem to have thought of a solution but not a problem. What problem would this solve? (I have built a few products that simulate Excel calculations for reporting automation, so this topic is very familiar to me.) > You seem to have thought of a solution but not a problem. What problem would this solve? For the people I've talked with so far, it means 1) they don't have to re-implement the spreadsheet logic in their server, and 2) whenever the spreadsheet is updated (either Google sheet edit, or an Excel file is uploaded again) the API is automatically up to date. Some of these people are already creating GRID documents backed by their existing spreadsheets, and have a use case to make an API call from their own systems to perform a computation that already lives in the spreadsheet. Notice I'm not talking about writing data to the spreadsheet and using it as a database. I'm talking about reading values from a spreadsheet model through a queryable API. Not sure how AirTable and DataTables compare – will have to look into that. > I'm talking about reading values from a spreadsheet model through a queryable API. OK, I understand now. There are an absolute ton of these products already. AirTable is the most famous, but Google and Microsoft also have official web APIs that do the same thing.