What's the difference between Sheets and Tables?

I am planning to move the members register to a Glide Table. I need the column Members-ID in Google Sheets for various calculations.

Ah, I see.

That’s a bit tricky. I think you’d need to leave your existing Google Sheet intact with at least that column, and then make sure it’s updated when new members join. That could get rather fiddly.

I don’t know what your calculations in the sheet are like, but I think I’d be more inclined to look at moving those into Glide instead.

Out of curiosity, what’s your reason for moving this sheet to a Glide Table?

I love the flexibility of Google Sheets but sooner or later it is better to move everything to Glide Tables if I understand you @Darren_Murphy correctly :nerd_face:

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haha, okay…

Well, yes and no.
I’m certainly a big fan of avoiding spreadsheet formulas and using Glide computed columns instead where ever possible. But that doesn’t mean all the data needs to live in Glide Tables.

I think it can often make sense to leave your data in Google Sheets - especially if you need to use it elsewhere. It really depends. In most of my apps I’ll have a mix of both Glide Tables and Google Sheets. For each new table/sheet that I add, I try to make a conscious decision about whether it should be a Glide Table or a Google Sheet. I don’t have any hard and fast rule, but it usually comes down to how I intend to use the data. If there is any likelihood that I’ll need it outside the app, then I’ll use a Google Sheet.

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@Darren_Murphy For example, I am not sure how to produce this in Glide Tables only:

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Do you mean the presentation, or the calculations, or both?

Both!

:joy:

Okay…

I think the calculations would be the easy bit. I’m a golfer (or at least I sometimes pretend to be one), so I’m familiar with the types of calculations that need to be done, and I can’t think of anything that would be much of a challenge with Glide computed columns.

That table is a different matter. It will be possible, but it won’t be simple. Essentially you’ll need to create a CSS/HTML table structure as a template, and then plug in the data. Exactly how that’s done will depend on how your data is structured.

As I understand from our earlier exchange about this, what you’re currently doing is displaying that Google table shown in your screen shot in a webview in Glide, yes? But I would assume that most of the values in that table are drawn from other tables using formulas and lookups, yeah? For example, I can imagine that you probably have one table for golfers/members, another one for courses, probably another for scores, and a few more.

So if you want to translate this into pure glide, it’ll be a similar approach. All your raw data will be in a series of tables/sheets, and then you’d pull all that data together using relations, lookups, joined lists and other computed columns to feed into a template for display in the app. The only difference is that instead of doing all the heavy lifting in the Google Sheet, it’s done in Glide.

The last time we had this discussion it was mostly about whether or not this was possible in Glide. I was arguing that it is - and I still firmly believe that it is. But whether or not it’s worth going to all this trouble with your app is another question. If what you currently have is getting the job done, then maybe it’s not worth the bother?

If you decide that it is, I’ll certainly be interested to see how you get on, and will help in any way that I can.

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@Darren_Murphy Thank you very much, your assumptions are quite right!

However, I think I have to remain in Sheets since it will take too much time and energy and I am not at all familiar with CSS.

The main reason for moving the Members register to Tables is that register data is used in three different Glide Apps and that I understand that Glide Tables can be shared between applications. Today I am using IMPORTRANGE to share this data and I have noticed that this could be fragile.

It would have been nice if Sheets could get data from Tables, is it worth putting this as a feature request, what do you think?

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I suspected that might be the case, and I don’t blame you. If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it :smiley:

Yes, this makes perfect sense.

Would a CSV export be good enough for your purposes?
This is certainly possible - I did a short tutorial on this a while back…

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Newbie question here: am I understanding this correctly → If using a Google Sheet as the app source, any public user who adds a new “item” will add a new row to the source Sheet? Does this occur if the source is a Glide Table?

If your add row or add form is adding data to a google sheet, then it will be stored and show up in the google sheet. If your add row or add form is adding data to a glide table, then it will only store data in the glide table. Glide tables are not connected to google sheets. The data in a glide table only lives in glide.

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Thanks for the quick reply! So then a follow up question: I’m looking to making an app in which each user will have their own set of data entries (stock transactions), will a Glide Table the way to go? I’m thinking the Sheet will just fill up with everyone’s transactions and be difficult to sort out. Will that also happen with the Table? I guess my first step is to see if Glide will even work for this app. Thanks again! :grinning:

The data will be stored the same whether you use a glide table or a google sheet. The only difference between the two is that there is the extra step of the data having to sync between glide and google. They both function the same otherwise. The only time I use google sheets, is when I need the data in the Google sheet to work with it in a way that I can’t when it’s in a glide table.

All data for everyone will store in the same table. I would make sure you have an email column in the data, so you have a way to know which row belongs to each user. Then you can simply filter the data by signed user (less secure), or apply row owners to that email column (more secure). If you don’t use row owners, then all data is downloaded to each user’s device. You can filter it, but it’s all still on the device and accessible to those that know how to access it. Row Owners is more secure because only the rows that a user owns are downloaded to their device. It all comes down to how secure the data needs to be. There’s advantages and disadvantages to using filters vs row owners.

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Gotcha. Thanks for the clear (and quick) answers. I’ll have to think more about this to see if Glide is the right choice for the app idea I have in mind. It seems like it would as my setup works well for me (and my subscribers) in Google Sheets, so Glide seems like the logical choice. I’ll play around with it some more and read more posts to get a better idea :+1:

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Just my 2 cents, if you’re using GOOGLEFINANCE to import stock data to Google Sheets then you should keep it in there.

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Thank you. Actually I won’t be using real-time data, I’m just trying to create a log where users enter their own positions and the app would show a few calculations like profit/loss, return on investment, etc.

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I wan to disconnect the sheet from my Glide table. Is there a way to do this without losing data? Everything is done in Glide, but it syncs with Sheets.

If the data source is google sheets, and your data is syncing to a google sheet, then you definitely are not using glide tables. Disconnecting the google sheet would cause your app to break as it would not have any tables linked to it. Glide Tables have a black icon with a glide logo. Google Sheet tables have a green icon with a sheets logo.

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Thank you. This is confirmation on what I THOUGHT I was seeing. Great explanation!