What’s old
Check out our annual retrospective to see what changed with Grist over the past twelve months, including underrated features and a community contributions collage.
What’s new
Run Grist on Azure
Last month we mentioned that Grist is now available on the AWS marketplace. This month, we get to announce that you can also find Grist on the Azure marketplace. The easiest way to set up a self-hosted instance, just got… another option.
Security update
On December 17th we released a build with several bugfixes found during a security audit. If you’re using Grist at getgrist.com, rest easy – the bugfixes have been patched. Self-hosters are recommended to update to grist-core version 1.3.2 as soon as possible.
Release notes: https://github.com/gristlabs/grist-core/releases/tag/v1.3.2
Grist Paris Summit
Pictured: CTO Paul, software engineer Jarek, and co-CEOs Anais & Dmitry
On December 3rd, we were lucky enough to take part in the first Grist Summit in Paris, co-organized by DINUM’s Grist Gouv team, La Suite numérique, and ANCT. A hearty thanks to all organizers and attendees for a successful event!
Expect more from this event in the new year, but Dmitry posted a comprehensive roundup and a summary of shared Grist use cases on LinkedIn which are worth a look! Also, Paul and Jarek were nice enough to repeat their well-attended talk on Grist’s custom widget builder widget.
New template - Recurring tasks 
We’ve just released a new template which shows how to track TODOs that repeat, so you can mark them complete, and then reset them for another cycle. A task tracker’s work is never done!
SCIM in Grist
Early support for SCIM (System for Cross-domain Identity Management) has been added to Grist, for any self-hosters who manage users across multiple services. Unfortunately, this very useful feature does not lend itself well to a neat-looking screenshot. 
Learn more about it in our Help Center.
Community highlights
It’s no coincidence that this month’s highlights are full of custom widgets. The new custom widget builder custom widget has had a hand in making custom widget-making handier. Say that ten times fast!
- celine_delval shared a beautiful custom widget (built using the aforementioned builder) just in time for Santa’s season, though I’m sure there are countless non-yule applications.
- Raphael_Guinot shared (and updated) his ambitious timeline widget, replete with custom shortcuts, a Gantt tool, and PDF exporting (!).
- Edouard_Gomez-Vaez solved a frequent issue of multiparty cost splitting with his simple yet powerful shared expenses widget.
- Jordi (who works at Grist), shared a peek at his custom sunburst graph built using the builder to visualize his NES collection/shopping list.
Working on something cool with Grist? Let us know by posting in the Showcase forum or our #grist-showcase Discord channel!
Learning Grist
Webinar - Migrating data from Excel to Grist: Team Expenses
Say goodbye to spreadsheet chaos! Join us to see how Grist improves upon Excel-based expense tracking. We’ll show you how to import data from Excel and Google Sheets, set up dashboards, and manage access control.
Thursday, January 23 at 3:00pm US Eastern Time.
Building custom widgets w/ Paul and Jarek
Couldn’t make it to the Grist Summit in Paris? No worries! Watch our December webinar to see Grist Labs’ very own CTO Paul and developer Jarek present their talk on Grist’s custom widget builder. Learn from the devs themselves how to create your own custom widget, step-by-step!