Hierarchy of different elements in Grist

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1

After reading documentation, here is what I understand the relationships and levels of different elements in Grist

  1. Tables comes under Page
  2. Page comes under document
  3. Document comes under workspace
  4. Workspaces also known as Sites

Is my understanding correct?

2

Workspaces is a folder with documents in Site

3 
Site (A)
  ↳ Workspace (B)
    ↳ Document (C)
      ↳ Page (D)
        ↳ Widgets (table, chart, custom, etc.)

I use widgets instead of table as the last level since the actual data tables are represented fully in the Raw Data page.

Screenshot 2024-09-05 at 2.14.08 PM
Screenshot 2024-09-05 at 2.14.08 PM1154Ă—234 21.4 KB

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4

Also having “fun” understanding the hierarchy. How do I skip the “document” stage? (I don’t get why this extra click is needed. Knowing its purpose would help in accepting it.)

This is what I’m hoping for: Would like to see this when I click “all documents” for our company (team).
Our Company (Site)
> CRM (Workspace)
- clients (page) (all pages have widgets ON them to display RAW DATA info)
- projects (page)
- client interactions (page)
- inventory (page)
- vendors (page)
> OFFICE (Workspace)
- tasks (page)
- contacts (page)
- task categories (page)
- SOP (page)
Using a spreadsheet analogy is helpful for me! Also, I believe that when I first create/start a “spreadsheet,” I’m creating a “raw data table.” Don’t understand how/when it flips into a page.
Thanks!!!

5

In your example, would the CRM and OFFICE workspaces be pulling from the same data? A document is Grist is defined by its shared store of data (you can also think of a document as a database, in a sense).

Using spreadsheet terminology, you can view a document as a single spreadsheet, with pages being different tabs. The difference being that all of these tabs have access to all information, because the underlying data (raw data) is organized like a standard relational database. You’re right that when you create a new empty table in Grist, it spawns a new table in raw data. The big distinction is that widgets can pull data from existing raw sources and display them in new ways. This in theory keeps the data organized and unduplicated (you change a value, it’s automatically updated in any widget where the value is used). We call them widgets, but you can also think of them as “views”. Pages are merely collections of these views and used for organization.

In my experience, getting the most out of Grist requires a bit of a conceptual jump from how a spreadsheet works. Also in my experience, this jump leads to better organized data, though I am biased. Hope this helps somewhat!

We’re actually making some changes to the document display page that should make navigating documents a bit easier.

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