February 2024 Newsletter#

Grist is hiring!#

Come work with us and help make Grist even better. Note: both applications involve puzzles. 🫡

What’s New#

This month we’ve seen a huge increase in community activity, which is incredibly exciting. We can’t say enough about how motivating it is to see users on Discord or the Community Forum create cool and useful things in Grist. But we can’t let you have all the fun – we’ve been very busy behind the scenes. Here are a few things that shipped last month, but keep your eyes open for more in the near future. 👀

Misc. improvements#

  • 🗓️ Calendar events now open in record cards on double-click
  • 🖼️ The image viewer custom widget can now display a carousel if multiple URLs are detected
  • 🫨 The Markdown widget saves by default when you lose focus
  • 🤖 Grist’s AI Formula Assistant can now handle larger documents
  • ✋ Custom widgets now show a nicer warning when required columns aren’t mapped

Community highlights#

FOSDEM lighting talk ⚡️#

Grist contributor and ANCT member Florent gave a great lightning talk at this year’s FOSDEM conference.

Tree visualizer widget 🌲#

The inimitable jperon (who will be showing up again) shared a very neat widget to visualize hierarchical data (like an org chart, for example). It even has bidirectional cursor linking! Check it out!

Tree visualizer widget GIF

DOCX report printing 📄#

Using docxtemplater, TomNit has shared an updated widget that lets Grist process templated .docx files, essentially allowing you to drive document generation using data in Grist. 🤯

Check out the full source code on GitHub.

DOCX reports screenshot

Signature widget ✍️#

Thanks once again to jperon (and of course the other open-source JS devs who make these experiments possible), we saw a proof-of-concept signature collection widget that is too much fun.

Signature widget GIF

Dynamic reference drop-downs in Grist 🔎#

Rogerio_Penna penned a detailed walkthrough on the Community Forum describing his solution to having filtered/dynamic drop-downs. Have you ever wanted a reference column’s options to be filtered by another reference column? It’s not an uncommon use-case, and Rogerio found a way to do it with the action button custom widget (which the community has also been working on).

Dynamic reference drop-downs screenshot

Peter_P_Breithaupt, partially inspired by Grist’s powerful SELF_HYPERLINK() function, created an in-depth exploration of the benefits of using navigation hyperlinks on large flat tables. Most importantly, how you can keep the same active record when switching between pages!

Hyperlink menu navigation GIF

Working on something cool with Grist? Let us know by posting in the Showcase forum!

Learning Grist#

Webinar: Controlling spreadsheet chaos#

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

Thursday March 21 at 3:00pm US Eastern Time.

Spreadsheet chaos webinar

SIGN UP FOR MARCH’S WEBINAR

Forms!#

In February, we celebrated our love of forms! We learned how to create a beautiful form and collect data that will populate a Grist data table upon submission.

WATCH FEBRUARY’S RECORDING

Help spread the word#

If you’re interested in helping Grist grow, consider leaving a review on product review sites. Here’s a short list where your review could make a big impact. Thank you! 🙏

We are here to support you#

Sprouts Program. Grist often surprises people with its capabilities. Schedule a free Sprouts call with an expert to see if Grist can address your needs. Learn more.

Have questions, feedback, or need help? Search our Help Center, watch video tutorials, share ideas in our Community, or contact us at support@getgrist.com.