What’s new
2025 is over!
Check out our end-of-year write-up covering 2025’s highlights: new features, makeovers, a virtual conference, and our deepest secrets.
Help Center redesign
We’ve done a significant redesign of the Grist Help Center, home to our support and developer documentation. This has been another productive collaboration with Emmanuel Pelletier!
GrainJS
We’ve also done some work on the documentation for GrainJS, a light web framework upon which Grist is built. GrainJS has always been there, but now you can better understand the frontend powering your spreadsheets – only 30kb and dependency-free!
Miscellaneous updates
- We’ve made the operations an Editor (as opposed to an Owner – learn more about roles here) can perform on a resource more consistent across team sites, workspaces, and documents. Specifically:
- An Editor can no longer rename or delete an organization, only an Owner can.
- An Editor can no longer rename, delete, or undelete a workspace, only an Owner can.
- We’ve implemented several improvements to RecordSet handling.
- There’s also a new Grist Desktop release with core updates and a few fixes.
Community highlights
- Thanks to everyone who participated in the Grist-sponsored Advent of Code this year, especially those who shared their solutions on Discord and commiserated with those who received many many many RecursionErrors.
- User dtnth on Discord shared a utility that transforms your Grist document’s code view to a TypeScript-ready API interface. Check it out here, in all its Comic Mono glory.
- If you use n8n with Grist, you may also be interested in dtnth’s pending PR for adding support for the upsert operation. If you don’t use n8n or make database queries regularly, you probably learned a new term (upsert), which is a melding of “update” and “insert”. Kind of like “grid” and “list”!
- Antonin Peronnet has shared a few handy widgets that deal with attachments:
- A simple image/PDF viewer
- A way to generate attachment URLs for in-document display (like in the Markdown or HTML widget)
- A formula that allows self-hosters to generate attachment URLs for external websites
- Riccardo_Polignieri has updated Pygrister – a Grist Python client – which quickly approaches a 1.0 release.
- Over on le forum, Aude shared a simple widget to display configurable text in a widget pane whose data is stored in the widget configuration itself rather than table data. Voila:
- If you’re cartographically-inclined and have a MapBox account, you can try out nic01asFr’s custom widget that lets you import and visualize geographic data, configure styles from Grist data, and export to GeoJSON.
- nic01asFr also shared a trifecta of useful project management custom widgets: kanban, Gantt, and the classic calendar.
- Raphael_Guenot has shared two custom widgets that enable easy client-side templating using LiquidJS. Importantly, the custom viewer has a dedicated “Print” button for easy PDF export.
Learning Grist
Grist 101
New to Grist? Check out our webinar designed to get you up to speed on essential features and helpful tricks.
Webinar: Advanced formulas with ordered lookups
Sometimes you want to mosey down a table, row by row, and get a running total. Or you need a formula in the current record to use the previous one, or to find the last record before a certain date, or the first event of the next month. With Grist’s ordered lookups and functions such as PREVIOUS(), you can do cumulative calculations, nearest matches, and more. Join Dmitry, their implementor and Grist’s co-CEO, for a deep dive on Grist functionality that goes under the radar, but serves as a perfect and efficient tool for a range of data workflows.
Thursday January 15th at 11:00am US Eastern Time.
2025 Year in Review webinar
Last month, we took a look back at everything Grist delivered in 2025. We focused on new features and updates over what was yet another long and lively year in the software world. Did you know we added comments? Experimental suggestions? Catch up with Grist and perhaps even get a look at what to expect in 2026.