March 2025 newsletter - Focus mode, Enterprise admin controls, and more spreadsheet makeovers

What’s new

Introducing F O C U S M O D E

Working with spreadsheets can be overwhelming. In this modern age, we’re overwhelmed with an overwhelming amount of information. Sometimes, we need to zoom in on what’s really important to make the most of our productivity. Introducing Grist’s F O C U S M O D E, a new way of viewing and working with spreadsheets that eliminates unwanted distractions and visual noise, letting you make the most of your data: one cell at a time.

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Grist Enterprise - Admin Controls

admin-controls

A new suite of user management features have been added to Grist Enterprise. Installation administrators will be able to access the new controls, whose functions include:

  • Viewing users, organizations, workspaces and documents in tabular form
  • Removing users
  • Modifying sharing settings for organizations, workspaces and documents

Learn more in our Help Center!

Spreadsheet Makeover - 3 new episodes!

If you haven’t been following Grist co-CEO Anais’ adventures over at Spreadsheet Makeover, you’ll want to check out the latest episodes, including:

The latter is especially informative for any Grist beginner struggling with references or overcoming “spreadsheet brain”. More to come!

grist-core has been updated to version 1.5.0. Lots of new stuff for self-hosters, so be sure to check out the release notes. Thank you to our first-time contributors!

More updates

  • There are now endpoints for downloading attachments as .zip and .tar archives. For external attachments, there is also an endpoint for reconnecting attachments via .tar archives. Technical endpoint documentation can be found in our API reference.
  • Grist Desktop has been updated, with a few desktop-specific bugs squashed.

Community highlights

  • From the French Grist forum (le forum Grist), audezu shares a cool trigger formula that tracks historical changes to a column.
    logs

  • In a similar vein, Varamil has shared an in-row chat-like widget that they use for collaboration.
    chat

  • Quentin Leroy has shared an adapter for Apache Superset enabling SQL querying of documents using the Grist API.

  • Another very cool showcase from audezu in le forum Grist – an access rule setup that limits users to editing columns only if another column is filled. That may sound odd or extremely specific, but seeing it in action shows how useful it could be on teams with varying permissions. Access rules!

  • lshalon on GitHub has added detailed documentation on how to use OpenRouter to enable other models for Grist’s AI Formula Assistant.

Working on something cool with Grist? Let us know by posting in the Showcase forum or our #grist-showcase Discord channel!

Learning Grist

Webinar - Creating Custom Invoices

Today is April 1st, but creating custom invoices in Grist is no joke!

Join us as we create and customize invoices right in Grist with the Invoice custom widget. You’ll learn how to set up your document to generate printable invoices for customers, and we’ll even show you how to update colors and add images to reflect your brand. Whether you’re starting from scratch or refining an existing invoice, this session will walk through how to create professional, tailored invoices for almost any organization.

Thursday April 24 at 11:00am US Eastern Time.

webinar

SIGN UP FOR APRIL’S WEBINAR

Access Rules for Distributed Organizations

In March, we explored how to secure and manage data across multiple locations — without the headaches. We covered strategies for controlling access to tables, columns, and rows, ensuring sensitive information stays in the right hands.

WATCH MARCH’S RECORDING

From the French Grist forum (le forum Grist ), audezu shares a cool trigger formula that tracks historical changes to a column.

What exactly Audezu has changed in his trigger formula that makes it different to my solution, which he linked in his post?

I have been using focus mode all day. It’s awesome. One of the best updates from Grist since… I don´t know, the early 1990s, when Grist transitioned from DOS to Windows 95.

I have this big table with over 90 columns and about 15 thousand rows. And it was just impossible to focus… now, with focus mode, I was able to display each cell in full screen glory, allowing me to do things I wasn´t even aware I was capable of before!

The first time I used the shortcut to enter Focus mode… it was like what Neo felt when he realized he could stop bullets in mid air… when he REALLY realized there was no spoon!

2 Likes

Oh wow, I missed the original source in audezu’s post. Apologies Rogerio, though I think I actually covered your solution last year so I didn’t completely overlook your contribution. :sweat_smile:

This wouldn’t have happened if my newsletter creation software had a Focus Mode.

No problem. If you accept a suggestion however to improve focus mode, you should make an integration of Grist with VR devices… so when in focus mode we can rotate each cell in multiple dimensions. That will allow us to notice hidden relationships or extra layers of data that are not easily visible in 3D, even in full screen.

Maybe one year from now? :wink:

2 Likes

Viewing users, organizations, workspaces and documents in tabular form

Does this kind of tabular card or widget layout exists in Grist documents ?

1 Like

Hey,

Is the component with tabs shown at Admin Controls available as a custom widget? It’s very interesting and clean.

1 Like

+ @Renato

No plans for this at the moment, but the interest is noted!

2 Likes

Qual?

Which one, Renato?

Este com as abas/guias. Tem em todas as páginas administrativas mostradas, mas em cada uma as abas tem nomes diferentes. No meu screenshot demonstrei apenas a página de usuários.

This one with tabs. It’s on all admin pages (Admin Controls) but in each one the tabs have different names. In my screenshot I only showed the users page.

Cool. Never had seen tabs on Grist before. Yes, obviously should be incorporated on the Table, Cards and Card List widgets. I am creating my own widgets with tabs.

I really dislike the default page after “login” being sorted by most recent. I shouldn’t be surprised that a setting to change this to All so it is in alphabetical order is missing.

Also Grist enterprise is way overpriced. You must be doolally or aiming for Meta to switch from Microsoft to Grist. I know it’s named Enterprise but there’s no also middle ground for those who aren’t enterprise users (aka medium+ companies) but still would like some of those features.

Grist is making some strange choices.