Showcase: New Advanced Charts — a no‑code dashboard widget for Grist by Anupress

Showcase
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Hello everyone :waving_hand:

Sharing a custom widget I’ve been building: Advanced Charts — a free, open‑source
widget that turns any Grist table into a website‑style dashboard you can edit in place,
like a page builder.

Live demo (no install, no Grist needed):

Advanced
Advanced1920×4056 562 KB

Use it in Grist → add a Custom widget and paste this URL:
https://anupress.github.io/grist-advanced-charts/

What it does

  • Header + tabbed body + footer, switched in‑page (no reload).
  • Stat cards (KPI + delta + sparkline), with custom icon uploads.
  • Charts — column, bar, line, area, pie, doughnut, treemap, funnel, radar,
    scatter, gauge (Apache ECharts). Pick any columns; incompatible types are
    greyed and the best one is starred ★.
  • Breakdown blocks — group‑wise counts with dots/percent, or shown as a
    donut/pie/bar/column chart.
  • Maps — Leaflet with marker clustering, lat/long auto‑detected, up to 4
    tooltip fields per pin.
  • Editable hero / image slider per page (WordPress‑style: alignment,
    size, font, colour).
  • Dark/light with a header toggle, 10 palettes, a global Design
    panel (corners, density, width, shadows, text size), and dynamic
    subtitles with placeholders (%count, %missing, %groups…).

Privacy

No ANUPRESS server. Everything runs in your browser; data stays in your Grist
document. The widget creates exactly one table — ANUPRESS_Config — to save
your design. Map tiles are the only third‑party request, and only if you add a
map. Delete ANUPRESS_Config and it falls back to the demo.

Repo

GitHub - anupress/grist-advanced-charts: Turn Grist data into interactive dashboards with Advanced Charts for Grist by ANUPRESS. Features a drag-and-drop builder, custom color palettes, and Excel-like charts (bar, pie, stats). Secure and fully private—your data never leaves your Grist instance. Includes seamless layout editing, pre-made templates, and zero external tracking. · GitHub (MIT)

What I’d love feedback on

  1. Anything broken in your Grist? (self‑hosted especially — I’ve only tested on
    the hosted service.)
  2. Is the consent + full‑access flow clear enough on the first click of Edit?
  3. Most‑wanted next chart type (sankey, heatmap, boxplot, candlestick…)?
  4. Would per‑industry starter templates (Sales / HR / Inventory / Research)
    be useful to you?

Thanks for taking a look — happy to answer questions or take PRs.
— Anupress Team

9 Likes
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Updated: V2.0.0

  • Fixed critical crash on self-hosted Grist — “Add a block” silently failed after clicking a tile. Obfuscator was mangling internal object keys; disabled the offending options and hardened the DOM helper.

  • New: Guided chart wizard — “Not sure? Let me help” opens a 3-step plain-language flow (which table → what to compare → what to measure), suggests the best chart type, adds it to your page.

Feel free to share your suggestions/opinions.

Thank you!

1 Like
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Update: v3.0.0. This one grew a lot since the wizard shipped in 2.0 — the widget has gone from charts on a page to something closer to a page builder that happens to live inside Grist.

22 block types now (up from 5). The ones this forum will probably care about most: a data table with search, click-to-sort and paging; an invoice block that renders a row as a printable document (line items from a linked table, or a single amount column); and a calendar where dragging an event to another day writes the new date back to your table. There are also progress bars, image blocks that read Grist attachments, testimonials, timelines, pricing tables, countdowns, QR codes and a sandboxed HTML embed.

10 starter templates. Each installs a complete multi-page dashboard plus sample tables with real-looking data. Any of its tables can instead be pointed at one of your own — there’s a column-matching step, and it only ever reads from yours. Switching templates offers to clean up the sample tables the widget created earlier; tables you made yourself are never on that list. You can preview them without Grist by URL: finance, research labs, developers — or swap in any of: nonprofits, legal, higher-education, marketing, small-business, sports-facility.

grist-template-finance-accounting
grist-template-finance-accounting2560×1720 159 KB

Print and PDF. Every block has an “Add to printout” button in view mode. Collect blocks from any pages, arrange them on an A4 or US Letter sheet with page-break guides that match where the printer will really break, and print or save as PDF. Data tables print as clean reports; an invoice prints alone.

grist-printable-layout
grist-printable-layout2560×1720 73.7 KB

Edit data from the dashboard. On a live document, every data block’s editor has an “Edit the data in …” button: fix a value or add rows, written to Grist as one undoable step. Formula columns show read-only. There’s also a Refresh button that re-reads every table the page uses.

Smaller things worth knowing: 16 palettes and 7 font pairings, a 509-icon searchable library, every control works from the keyboard, and dates are read and written in the column’s own timezone, so nothing drifts a day between regions.

Privacy hasn’t changed: no server, everything runs in the viewer’s browser, and the design saves into your own document.

Demo: Advanced Charts — by ANUPRESS
Docs if you want the long version: the setup guide, a tour of all ten templates, and a block-by-block tutorial. Full changelog is on GitHub.

If your industry is missing from the templates, tell me what tables you keep and I’ll look at building it.

1 Like