I am a new Grist user - I am a programmer who joined Investment banking and became a fan of Excel. Then I came back to programming since I was missing it and was trying to find a way to solve the typical issues that my clients face in using Excel for data consolidation and reporting. After trying Power Query, Power Pivot and even Coda, I was envisioning myself creating an Excel replacement that allows drill down that is available in dashboard applications like Tableau and PowerBI - click on the data from one table to get the linked records in another table. When I saw Grist, I was so taken aback to see my vision already in reality using relational linking.
The way I discovered Grist itself is an interesting story - I was trying to diff between 2 different Excels to find out what was changed between the 2 versions of a large Excel document. I used PowerQuery with some advanced Excel formula, then tried python and pandas to recreate the diff and I was not satisfied as I was looking for git-style diff. Then I found my solution in a library in R called DataCompare and I was so pleased with it. There was another R library also called daff showing in my YouTube recommended videos - out of curiosity, I checked it out and I was even more impressed that it had developed a language to specify the diff and even the ability to replay the diff on another table - Wow! I was so amazed at the depth of thought that has gone into it, as I was also thinking long and hard about the same issues. Then I wanted to find more about the creator of daff - Paul. So, I tried to follow his trail of work only to get 404 in most places - I was thinking that he must be dead. With heaviness in my heart, I tried to see when was his last commit in GitHub - to my joy, I found a commit in August 2024. So, I thought that Paul has created a startup with these ideas and that is how I landed on Grist.
Needless to say I am very impressed - I wanted to bring python to my Excel users and I was already working with the author of xlwings, a python package that allows us to work with XL easily using Pandas. When I saw the first product intro webinar by Dmitry and he mentioned DRY , I was just so happy to find a set of people with similar thoughts, similar approaches to making data management more efficient.
I watched a few webinars and then tried to set up something simple - I wanted to really understand the formulas and went through the Help Center on Formulas - such a beautifully explained document. I wish you posted a link the document with the data used to produce the document so that I can practice the scenarios to see whether I really understood them.
I loved the many subtle usability features of Grist - columns showing a $ sign when in formula mode, spaces replaced by underscore, an equal sign in formula cells to quickly recognize a formula cell, trigger formula to correct data as it is entered or to provide a default value, when a formula cell is converted to data cell, the formula is retained - wow! so many nice little usability enhancements. I loved the Code View and I took a quick look at pygrister - there is so much to explore and learn about.
I am so happy that I discovered Grist - looking forward to setting it up for a usecase where I am working with a large International Organization to streamline their reporting to the government donors.
- Hi