Greetings all, embarassed to say I only recently learned about the existence of Glide when it popped up in my Google feed. It looks very slick indeed.
I am a Product Expert in the Google Docs help forum, with a special interest in Sheets and Google Apps Script, and also web development in general. By profession, I am an optometrist.
Question: I’m still coming to terms with navigating around here - I have seen mention of an imminent Glide native spreadsheet solution, which I think means a Google Sheets alternative. Is there any announcement/information about this that someone can point me towards?
@Deena’s post may not be visible to everyone, since it’s in the Insider’s category, but basically in the same way you can have glide only column types, you can have an entire sheet that that is contained only within glide and not synced back to google sheets. It’s currently being tested and hasn’t been released yet, but main advantages are in keeping the data entirely within glide and bypassing the google sheet altogether. It won’t be as robust as a google sheet, but anything you can see and do within glide now would also be available within a glide only sheet. This provides speed and the potential for a much larger capacity without the bottlenecks that currently exist when syncing data back and forth to a google sheet. This also potentially cuts costs to glide as well and allows for a greater amount of sheet to glide updates for those that are only using a free plan. In the future I hope to use them in a hybrid form where some of my data would reside entirely within glide and some within the google sheet.
Many thanks to you both - I can see the thread that @Deena linked just fine.
@Jeff_Hager, the advantages you mention of keeping the back-end within Glide are very clear. I guess by “not as robust” you mean that you can’t do the sort of manipulation that you would be able to within Google Sheets. But looking through the guides and tutes, there seems to be a philosophy that you generally want to keep the database side as raw as possible anyway, which I agree with. Your potential hybrid solution seems the way to go.
Thinking out loud, what would be great, is if the Glide sheets servers could be confined to geographic regions, for health information/privacy regulations. But that’s a bit of a selfish FR
Yes, the more you can keep the data raw, the better in my opinion. There’s certain things like complex formulas, or complex math, or google only functions that can only be done in the google sheet, so it all depends on your situation.
Agree on geographic locations. I know some companies that are regulated by the government will not allow data to be stored on foreign servers, but I think that starts to come at a big cost when it comes to cloud hosting.
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