Charts from a Google Sheet

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Hi everyone,

I’m exploring an approach to get around some of the limitations of Glide’s native chart types (for example, no stacked area charts, limited customisation, etc.), and I’d love to hear if others have tried something similar.

The idea:

  • Use Google Sheets as the data source instead of Glide Tables

  • Build more advanced charts directly in Google Sheets (e.g. stacked areas, more flexible grouped/stacked bars, custom axes, etc.)

  • Publish the Google Sheets chart as an image

  • Embed that published image URL into Glide using an Image component

The main benefit would be leveraging Google Charts’ flexibility while still allowing the data to be edited and updated via actions inside the Glide app.

My key question is about reliability and freshness:

  • If the data in the Sheet is updated via Glide actions…

  • Does the published chart image reliably update?

  • And does the image shown in Glide refresh automatically (or with minimal delay)?

  • Have people seen caching issues, delays, or cases where the image doesn’t refresh as expected?

I’m especially interested in real-world experiences:

  • Forecasting over multiple years

  • Dashboards that change frequently

  • Any tricks to force refreshes or avoid stale images

If you’ve tried this approach (successfully or not), I’d really appreciate hearing how it worked for you :folded_hands:

Thanks

2

I haven’t tried, but you have to be wary with this. I assume you’re using a URL without any parameters.

As you said, Glide may hard cache that URL, so you would have to add a constantly updated parameter, e.g:

https://website.url/image.png?refresh=currentTimestamp

So you force Glide to constantly read newest info from that URL, and the param doesn’t alter anything in your actual image.

If it were me, I would explore generating charts using Chart.js.

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