March 2024 Newsletter - Improvements to Grist Forms, new file formats, and a boot page for self-hosters

What’s New

Improvements to Grist Forms

Sections

You can now add sections to Grist Forms. To add a section to your form, click the Add New button at the bottom of each section, and then click “Insert section above” or “Insert section below”.

Choice and reference select

When filling out a form, you can now search for values in long choice and reference select fields, making it easier to find the exact option you’re looking for.

Quick embed code

If you’d like to embed a form on your website, click the share icon then “Embed this form” to reveal an embed code.

Reset form

A new “Reset” button is now available on published forms so that form takers can reset a form back to its initial state.

Imports and exports - two new file formats!

DOO Separated Values (DSV)

Can your spreadsheet DOO this? The DOO Separated Value (DSV) format is an important improvement to Comma Separated Values (CSV), and is now supported for both importing and exporting by Grist. DSV uses a special character from the Unicode astral plane as a separator, to better protect the integrity of your data. Learn how.

Credits: DSV was initially proposed by Jamie Matthews. We’ve followed his specification precisely, but changed the file extension to avoid a conflict with Pipe Separated Values (PSV). The value of this specific character from the Unicode astral plane for testing software was first proposed by Mathias Bynens.

Tab Separated Values (TSV)

You can now export and import data as Tab Separated Values (TSV) from the Share menu.

Grist boot page

An early version of a diagnostics page for self-hosted Grist is now available. Learn how to enable it.

Migrate from Spreadsheet.com

We’ve built a tool to help you migrate your Spreadsheet.com data into Grist, including attachments and relations, without the need to manually download and upload your files. Check it out here!

Spreadsheets.com Migration Tool

Community highlights

@tomnitschke built some new custom widgets, including

You can find them all on Github.

@jonathanperret built a custom widget that embeds paysage - a collaborative, visual coding playground - into a Grist document. Um, it’s amazing? Watch the full video here.

Learning Grist

Webinar: AI Formula Assistant Best Practices

Grist’s AI Formula Assistant simplifies the hardest part of spreadsheets — formulas. In April’s webinar we’ll share tips on how to get the most out of the assistant.

Thursday April 25 at 3:00pm US Eastern Time.

SIGN UP FOR APRIL’S WEBINAR

Controlling spreadsheet chaos

In March, we saw how Grist can contain spreadsheet sprawl. Similar to our previous Grist/Excel webinar, we look at how Grist is designed to avoid many of the very familiar problems associated with spreadsheet workflows, such as merging and normalizing.

WATCH MARCH’S RECORDING

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:thinking: It’s not April 1st yet, though…

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