This is an interesting concept. It creates a Web addressable space for a google spreadsheet. So for example, say you were a local bottle store with a large, rotating tap list that you keep on a google spreadsheet.
I copied the data from that link and pasted into my own spreadsheet to illustrate. It looks like this:
I altered it so the field names are the first row and the field values are all the other rows. This makes it look like a database table.
If I paste the spreadsheet URL into the sheetbest site, it pumps out another URL for the API. When I click that, I get a JSON representation of all the data. (It renders nicely in Firefox)
Imagine designing a website for them. You could give them a spreadsheet and tell them to just edit it with the current data and your site could drive the display directly from that spreadsheet.
It would be quite useful in situations where a site has a bunch of configuration settings. Another use would be to generate on line reports from a spreadsheet.
It would not be good in cases where the spreadsheets were really huge I think. Inventory, orders or catalogs. I suppose some people might keep track of these things on spreadsheets, but that is not a good idea.
A couple of nits/questions:
- The dollar and percentages in my spreadsheet are entered as numbers. They should be returned in the API call as numbers also (not strings with % and $ attached)
- What happens if your list is very large? Can I paginate the results?
- I’d like to index the list by something other than the spreadsheet row number. For example, the
Tapfield.
Supposedly, it is writeable also. The means, presumably that I could alter the spreadsheet values via code.