Hello, kudos and questions

Grist Feedback
1

Hello all! Hope you are well well.

I just stumbled across Grist this week (via a recommendation from ChatGPT of all places) and I have to say I’m really impressed. I spent a good chunk of last year looking for datasheet based products, co-code products etc. and Grist never came up. It looks great so far, what’s the catch :sweat_smile: ?

Before I have my heart broken again, is there a shortlist of know limitations or gotchas for Grist I should be aware of? My use case is fairly simple… want to share spreadsheet data with ~50 external clients. I am trying to avoid building a custom application when I think I can get an MVP done with a few organized views/pages of the data.

Is this something Grist can handle? What the the most common and practical uses you have seen successfully working in the wild?

Cheers, Darrell

2

When you start to use action buttons and custom widgets, Grist can handle almost anything

One thing it can’t handle is to have data accessed by multiple different documents

So let’s say you have an employees table.

If you need that data accessed by your payroll document, your training document, your projects document, etc. You better EITHER:

have multiple copies of it, updated and maintained by a third party automation app like Zapier or n8n

Or

Use a single document for all your very different processes

If you do that however, it will become complicated to handle permissions and also to hide pages and menu links

3

Thanks Rogerio. Looking now, no custom domain on anything less than the Enterprise plan is a non-starter. Are there any known workarounds for that? Self-hosted maybe, or the static viewer.

Maybe I build the backend and user auth and display the data for each client account using the static viewer. Need to think about it more and understand how I could get this done.

4

Yes, I use self hosted, with Docker… the Omnibus version. It’s easier to install because it already comes with Traeffik, nginx, and lots of other stuff I don´t know about.

This is an experimental way to install Grist on a server quickly with authentication and certificate handling set up out of the box.

But it’s http… and because it already comes with those things, it seems to be quite impossible to use your own authentication later, if you decide to go https.

So there is that to think about before your self hosted installation. There is the so called Grist-Core version, which you install in Docker and then you have to install all the authentication separately. But then you can get https, etc.