The user interface-columns and rows-is part of our cognitive canon, and decades of use have trained businessfolk everywhere in what tech writer Steven Levy neatly dubbed, back in 1984, “ A Spreadsheet Way of Knowledge.”
Databases are powerful but inscrutable to see what’s “in” yours, you need to query it, which usually means having a programmer on staff.īut with a spreadsheet, everyone knows how to open it up and look at it. Indeed, as Tarouca pointed out, a spreadsheet is actually better for building a small business app than an old-fashioned database. “It’s really fun to build these things.” Because he was already familiar with regular spreadsheets, he says, it wasn’t terribly hard to figure out. “I’m not a developer, but I’m a geek,” he told me. Tarouca used Rows as the backend for his service: Customer orders flowed into his sheets from his web site, and local cooks typed their inventory into forms he created with Rows if a formula detected the cooks weren’t making enough of a particular item (orders for omelettes > supply of omelettes), the sheets would blast a warning out to his team’s Slack so someone could deal with it. He’d founded a startup in Lisbon (now acquired by the food-ordering firm EatTasty) that let people in Airbnbs order delivery meals from local cooks. I spoke to Mário Tarouca, a Portuguese entrepreneur who used Rows in precisely that way. In that sense, spreadsheets are joining the “no code” trend in Silicon Valley-they’re becoming tools that let non-programmers automate some very complex workflows.
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