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This episode is the audio from a presentation I gave a few weeks ago to members of Betaworks based in NYC. Betaworks is a startup accelerator, co-working space, and community of founders. No-code is a pretty hot topic right now, and in this presentation I talk about how spreadsheets is one of the first no-code “platforms” and how your spreadsheet skills can be extended to build real tools. The presentation is adapted from a talk I gave last year at Webflow’s No-Code Conference. I embedded the “slides” at the bottom of the post, and here is a link to the slides if you want to look on your own.

Summary of presentation

1. The skills you’ve learned in Excel/Google Sheets — include data structuring — translate to building workflows for any part of your business
2. Thinking beyond spreadsheets as a way to do data analysis or “number crunching”
3. Any tool that helps automate or solve some workflow at your company can be built with spreadsheets
4. Why learning spreadsheets can set you up well for learning “no-code” tools

Spreadsheet examples from presentation

During the presentation, I showed actual spreadsheets (Excel and Google Sheets) I’ve built in the past for freelance clients and friends. The main concept I’m trying to convey is that each of these spreadsheets look and feel more like an application rather than a model that forecasts out certain values. Each of these examples consists three core elements:

1. Database – A place to store information
2. User Input – Fields and forms for someone to fill out
3. Calculations/Display – Formulas (e.g. “business logic”) to make the spreadsheet output something for you (the administrator) or the user

My 2 cents: When you’re building an application in a spreadsheet, you’re extending the original purpose and audience Excel and Google Sheets was meant to serve: financial models for accountants. But this is what makes the spreadsheet so versatile. The fact that an analyst can string together formulas to make a spreadsheet look and feel like an application is what gives the spreadsheet power. This innovation also pushes Microsoft, Google, and other platforms to release new features that give analysts the ability to build tools, not just models.

I’ve written extensively about this subject in the past, so will leave my soliloquy at that. On to the examples

Bachelorette planning Google Sheet

The first example I discuss is this bachelorette party planning Google Sheet I built for a friend. This spreadsheet has been duplicated quite a few times by friends of friends, and all it does is help a to-be bride plan figure out which weekend works best to have a bachelorette party.

The key insight is that the database is everything from column B onwards and row 3 and below. All the availability for each person is captured in each of these cells and there’s some conditional formatting to give the bride a visual indicator to see when a weekend is available.

The user input is the ability for each friend who is shared the Google Sheet to edit the cells. “Yes,” “No,” and “Maybe” are the only inputs that matter for this Google Sheet. Finally, the calculations are in rows 31-33 which tallies up the user inputs for each weekend so the bride can see which weekend is the “most free” for her friends.

There are countless iPhone and Android apps you can download to do this exact same thing, but this spreadsheet just does one thing and one thing well: help brides figure out which weekend to plan a bachelorette party.

Splitting costs with friends

This splitting costs with friends blog post is by far the most popular post on my blog since I published it in 2014 (thanks Google search!). Every day I still get requests to give people edit access to the Google Sheet (please just make a copy of it instead of requesting edit access). Here’s the Google Sheet if you want to make a copy for yourself.

Similar to the previous example, the database is all the items, costs, and who participated in the cost from rows 2 and down. The user input are the cells themselves, but the most important part of the Google Sheet are the 1s and 0s from column C onward. Those 1s and 0s represent whether a friend or family member “participated” in the cost. This allows the spreadsheet to do some basic calculations to figure out who owes what.

Rows 26-28 are the calculations that the trip organizer can see at a glance to see who is owed or who owes money. Again, numerous apps and custom tools you can pay for or download to split costs with friends, and this Google Sheet mimics the features of those apps in a more bare bones way.

Patient intake system

This example shows when the spreadsheet is really extended beyond what it was intended to do. This was for one of my consulting clients who needed a new CRM system for managing new patients at their clinic.

The Excel file basically lets the operations manager at the clinic quickly “move” new patients from one spreadsheet to another using a VBA macro. To mimic the look and feel of an application, I drew these blue and green buttons using the shape feature in Excel and tied a macro to each button. The database consists of patient details, the user input is simply each row of data, and the calculations involve these macros that move data from one spreadsheet to another.

This gets into an important concept that an Excel file or Google Sheet are not that great for: workflows. Since everything is usually calculated in real-time in a spreadsheet, it can be difficult to do a if-this-then-that type of workflow without using a macro or script (see my last post on automating a tedious filling values down task).

“Slides” from Betaworks presentation

The rest of the presentation includes tool and tips for building applications with other no-code tools. Slides are below:

Original talk from Webflow’s No-Code Conference in 2019:

Other Podcasts & Blog Posts

In the 2nd half of the episode, I talk about some episodes and blogs from other people I found interesting:

• No other podcasts for this episode given how long this episode is!