- All right.
So usually on this channel, we have a spreadsheet, right?
Usually you don't even see me
and we walk through a series of steps
on how to solve a problem.
But today I have a guest on the show
his name's Darren Alderman,
and he's going to talk about something
a little bit different.
He's going to talk
about how to have people access a spreadsheet
without actually seeing the spreadsheet.
So let me introduce Darren
and he's going to take it from here.
- Hey, thanks Adam.
Yes, I build apps on top of spreadsheets
and that's what I'm gonna show you how to do in this video.
If you want an extended guide
to learn how to do this
go ahead and check out the link down in the description.
Let's go ahead and jump into this tutorial.
So my challenge today is to show you
how to turn this simple spreadsheet
into an easy to use app
that you can use on your phone from anywhere here.
We're tracking inventory for office supplies.
You can see here
we have the product name, code,
and description, a picture,
the price that we purchase these office supplies for,
as well as what we sell them at.
And then we have the quantity.
What I wanna do is create an app
where I can adjust this quantity
on the go from my phone
so that I don't have to come and update this quantity
in the spreadsheet.
To do this, we're going to be using
a no code app builder called Glide.
And Glide allows you to create powerful apps and websites
without code.
And I've shared my referral link for Glide
down in the description.
Once you create your Glide account
it will prompt you to create a team,
which is basically like a folder for all of your Glide apps.
We can go ahead and create a new project,
call it inventory,
and we're going to be creating a Glide app.
Next we'll select the source of our data.
This is where our data is going to live.
Our data right now is in a Google Sheet.
So we'll go ahead and select that.
Then we'll be prompted to search
for our Google Sheet, select it.
And the really cool thing is Glide has intelligently
built an app based off our data.
You can see here, we already have a tab called inventory.
You can see here right in the middle
we have all of the items
that we're currently tracking in inventory.
And if we click into one of these items
we have a nice details view
for each row in our inventory spreadsheet.
So just to give you a little tour,
on the top left hand side
we have all the tabs in our app.
Right now we only have one tab, inventory.
Below that we have a list of all the components
that are on the current screen.
For this one we just have a search bar and a list.
On the right hand side you can see
the properties for the current screen.
And you can see right here, the source of the current screen
is the inventory spreadsheet.
And the really cool thing about this
is we didn't just import this data into Glide.
Glide is actually sitting on top of our spreadsheet
and syncing back and forth.
So when we make updates inside of Glide
those updates will be reflected inside of the spreadsheet.
Now, before I show you that in action
let's go ahead and customize the app to our liking.
Let's give it the option to adjust the quantity
within the app,
and then we'll publish the app
so that we can download it on our phones.
The first thing I wanna do is adjust this list view
to embrace the pictures a little bit more.
So I'm gonna change the style to be a tile list view.
I'm gonna change the tile shape to be a square
and then put two squares per row.
And then the last thing is,
I don't really care about the ID, or the code here,
so I'm gonna change that to be the quantity.
So now I have a nice list view
of all of the items in our inventory.
Let's click into the binder here
and I'm gonna adjust the top image
to have a rounded corners.
I'll leave the description as it is.
And then for the numbers
I'm actually gonna put all of these inside of a table.
So I'm gonna click the plus icon here
to add a new component, and search for table.
I click on that to add it.
And then on the right hand side
I can adjust the properties for this table
and add in the purchase price, sell price, and the quantity.
So now I have a nice way to view all of the data
in the row of my spreadsheet.
The last thing I wanted to do was update the quantity.
So I'm gonna add in a button bar to do that,
so that things can happen When I click on the button.
For the left button I'll call that minus one
and make it a red color.
And then for the right button,
I'll call that plus one
and make it a success color and make it solid.
Now, whenever we click these buttons
actions can occur.
For the right button,
whenever I click it, I want it to increment.
So I'm gonna search for the increment action,
and increment the quantity by one, or plus one.
For the left action, I want to do a similar thing
where I increment.
So I'll search for increment number,
but in this case I want to increment by negative one.
This is the same thing as decrementing by positive one.
And so now whenever I click on a button like the plus one,
the quantity goes up
and if I do minus one, the quantity goes down.
Sweet!
So the last thing we needed to do was style the app
and publish it.
So let's go to our settings
and adjust the color for our app, as well as the theme.
And I'll turn off this to remove dark mode from this app.
For the app info, I'll leave the name of the app the same
but I am going to adjust the icon
and I'm gonna use this shopping cart here.
Finally, for privacy or security,
I'm gonna remove all sign in from the app
and just make this a public app
so that I don't have to sign in.
And then the last thing to do is to publish it.
So I'll go ahead and publish the app
and then Glide will post this app to a unique URL.
I'll exit out of there
and then click this button here
to open this in a new tab.
Alrighty, the moment of truth.
Let's go ahead and click into the folder here
and we can see right now that the quantity is 15.
Let's go ahead and increase that to 22.
If I come back to my spreadsheet
we can see that the folder here is now 22.
And if I go back to inventory
I can decrement that back down to say 10.
And then if I go back to my Google Sheet
and look at folder,
we can see that this number is automatically updated to 10.
So the updates I'm making in the app
are synced to the spreadsheet.
And the cool thing is updates in the spreadsheet
are also synced back to the app.
And now all I have to do to get this
on my phone is to scan this QR code right here
and then bookmark this app to the homepage on my phone.
All right.
I hope the wheels are spinning for you.
And you are thinking
about how you can turn your spreadsheet into an app.
We intentionally wanted to keep this tutorial short
so that you could truly see
how you could quickly turn a spreadsheet into an app
with ease.
But if you'd like to learn more
I've created an extended guide
on how you can turn your spreadsheet into an app.
in one week.
It covers additional features
like adding and deleting items, security, and more.
To get this free guide, just click on the link
at the top of the description and tell me where to send it.
Thanks so much for letting me
share the power of no code with you today.
And thanks to Adam for giving me the opportunity to do.