GYGys·Jul 13, 2019
In Show HN: Stein – Use Google Sheets as a No-Setup Databasejsoma
tabletop
JavaScript2012–2019
jsoma / tabletop · Archived
tabletop
Tabletop.js gives spreadsheets legs
6Distinct people
7Mentions
0Explicit recommenders
3.8KGitHub stars
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What it is
Tabletop.js gives spreadsheets legs
GitHub
Where it is used
No documented product use has been verified yet.
What people are saying
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This week on Hacker News
Nov 7–Nov 14 UTC · Direct repository links and separately labeled related project stories. Indexed through 11/14/2026, 3:03:16 PM UTC.
No direct repository links were found in the indexed HN discussions over the past seven days. Older discussions are available below.
Mentions over time
HN mentions by year7 dated mentions
Observed mentions: 2012-02-27 22:09:48 UTC to 2019-07-13 13:22:10 UTC.
Counts come from the repository’s dated source evidence. Index cutoff: 2026-11-02 08:16:59 UTC.
View mention counts and date ranges
| Period | Start (UTC) | End (exclusive, UTC) | Mentions | Submissions | Comments |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2012 | 2012-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2013-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 1 | 1 | 0 |
| 2013 | 2013-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2014-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 3 | 0 | 3 |
| 2014 | 2014-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2015-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| 2015 | 2015-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2016-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 1 | 0 | 1 |
| 2016 | 2016-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| 2017 | 2017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| 2018 | 2018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| 2019 | 2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2 | 0 | 2 |
What Hacker News says
7 sourcesYou can do this for free today using open source libraries. https://www.levels.fyi/comp.html used to run entirely on a Google Form + Spreadsheet and still backed by one.
Submit form: https://stackoverflow.com/a/37743080
Get data from sheet: https://github.com/jsoma/tabletop
Happy to answer any questions.
In Show HN: Stein – Use Google Sheets as a No-Setup DatabaseGoogle Spreadsheets is awesome as a quick and dirty CMS. I use it all the time at the newspaper i work for, in combination with Tabletop (https://github.com/jsoma/tabletop). Only thing i lack right now is some kind of library that could cache those sheets using Redis for speed.
In Show HN: Turn a Google Spreadsheet into an APII maintain a library[1] that's pretty popular with the journalism crowd for converting Google Spreadsheets to JSON, and you're exactly right about the risk[2]. Google's been sitting on a bug for over 6 months now because API usage of Google Spreadsheets just isn't important enough to merit a fix[3].
We've sent people off into the caching world[4] to fit it on our end, but your criticism is unfortunately spot-on.
[1] https://github.com/jsoma/tabletop
[2] https://github.com/jsoma/tabletop#okay-wait-weve-got-a-big-p...
[3] http://productforums.google.com/forum/#!category-topic/docs/...
[4] http://github.com/jsoma/flatware
In Use a Google Spreadsheet as your JSON backendTabletop is a great JS library for dealing with this:
https://github.com/jsoma/tabletop
In Use a Google Spreadsheet as your JSON backendYup, I do this. And have done it to manage reporting projects because it helps the researchers realize that there are facets of information that we need to collect for every row. And then creating a visualization or analysis takes little more work than writing a script to loop over every row.
A popular plugin among the data-journalism crowd is tabletop.js...spreadsheet data is uploaded to Google Docs, and data-stories use it to create interactive graphics.
https://github.com/jsoma/tabletop
In Use Google Docs to Manage your Digital ProjectsTabletop: Google Spreadsheets with a single JS include
4 points · Open discussion