We’re thinking about ways to make Grist an even more powerful spreadsheet-to-database-to-app builder by implementing internal workflows that empower you to set up rules like “when x record is created, update y record in z table.”
We’re currently still in the ideation phase, and your feedback is crucial to ensuring that we prioritize and build the right workflows that meet your needs.
First to post!
Here’s just an example of my use case: Loom | Free Screen & Video Recording Software
In this video, I’m only mentioning DocsCloud, but Stripe would be another cool example.
With your formulas, you can easily make calculations and push this data to Stripe to create invoices.
Or also making it possible to push/sync data to/with Gyana, another data-oriented app: Gyana | Exclusive Offer from AppSumo
Something worth mentioning I guess (I’m a noob), is that Airtable is polling-based, which takes a hell of a time to send data to external apps. If do you plan to create integrations, please skip polling if that makes sense 
Hi!
The most basic and powerful workflow would be to send an email when a field matches certain conditions. For example, send an email when the date in the field equals “today”. For this it would be great to have integrations to Gmail or Outlook.
@anais-grist This seems very important but it is difficult at least for me to imagine different scenarios. Can you possibly give some of the top examples that you all are considering that may help get us started?
I do like the idea of “when x record is created, update y record in z table” and I would find that useful, but I would not of thought of it, if I did not see it.
Are there anymore examples like that?
Hi Gerardo and Chris! It’s nice to see you both on the forum. 
Chris, some of the automations may purely be internal, such as “When a record with a formula returns a certain value in Table 1, create another linked record in Table 2.”
Other automations, such as Gerardo’s example, would integrate with external services. For example, “When a record enters a view (i.e. it’s meeting certain filter criteria, perhaps), send me a message on Slack!” or “When a this Google Form integration reaches 500 responses, email a summary of the results to this group email.”
ohhhh ok, I see!
Externally I would love to see when a record get’s updated, send notification to Slack, or email, possibly with options such as as a daily summary, weekly, and/or monthly summary. That would also make it easier for sharing, like in my accountants case as I mentioned in another thread. Although I think the API and middleware integrations like Pabbly would make simpler.
Internally I would like to see some cross document functionality… Update the record here, and have a table in another Grist document updated. Kind of a cross document lookup, if you will.
This may exist already, but if not, then I’d like to see some formula or logic based cell formatting options in particular using colors. ex. if value is lower then x, then cell range turn red.
Lastly, I think it would be a cool workflow/automation to have a document ex. invoice, or report, generated after a certain trigger… like end of month, or when a row is filled.
These are great ideas, Chris!
Conditional formatting has come up before too. It’s definitely a feature many Grist creators would make use of. In the meantime, I use formulas and filters to create conditional views of data.
For example, say you have a column of average reviews in a table of products, and you want to easily see when the average review for a product falls below 4.0. You could create a column with the formula $AvgReview < 4.0. This would return either a true or false value (which can be displayed more appealingly with a toggle column). Either in the same view or in another view, filter by that formula column to only show records with a true value.
Hi,
Is this feature a real thing?
I don’t see this on a roadmap here Roadmap for Grist · GitHub neither in documentation.
If you mean conditional formatting, it is in fact on the roadmap, as completed! Conditional formatting · Issue #79 · gristlabs/grist-core · GitHub
Conditional formatting has been available for a while, and is even used in some of the Grist templates.
No, I was asking about the main topic, i.e. workflows.
I think it would be quite important to have a simple system to have different tasks, or stages of the workflow, and at each one be able to tell which of fields of a form are visible or not, editable or not (sometimes you want to see the info but you don´t want it to be editable anymore)
Maybe it could be done with field that corresponds to a list of stages. Each stage then has a list of all fields, with checks for “EDITABLE” and “VISIBLE”, as well as conditions for moving to next stage and to whom that stage is visible (by specific users, by roles, by creatorm by “field”)
That would be great to have in a simplified way, perhaps with an “archive” button.
That said, what you described is already possible with access rules. I’ve seen documents with access rules that “lock” (make read-only) certain rows and/or columns based on data in other fields (such as the status) or who the user is.
There is also an access rules webinar that starts with the simplest rules and builds in complexity to do things like what you’ve described. Access Rules - Mar 16, 2022 - YouTube
Yes, I know it can be done with Access Rules. I just think it would be much easier.
I guess I didn´t understand what you mean with an “archieve” button… 