Getting Started
New to SheetDream? This guide will help you to get started!
Welcome to SheetDream!
SheetDream brings advanced connectivity to your Google Sheets or Airtables by creating APIs directly from your data. This allows other applications to directly interact with the data within your sheets, and allows you to embed sheet data onto your website and/or apps in any number of creative ways.
The traditional APIs offered by both Google Sheets and Airtable force upon you a number of inconveniences:
- Rate limits and periodic connectivity issues (neither API is meant for random access)
- Spreadsheet-like syntax which makes interactivity with other APIs more difficult
- Limits on maximum number of elements that can be inserted and/or updated at one time
- Forced paging requirements (e.g. can only request 100 items at a time)
SheetDream sits in front of your Airtable tables and your Google Sheets spreadsheets, and provides a RESTful API without any of these limitations.
SheetDream also provides a number of powerful features for connecting your spreadsheet data with external data sources: an API engine for polling external APIs, phantom tables (temporary data storage), webhooks, and transforms which are a powerful way of combining and merging the data from multiple different data sources.
If you are looking to:
- Rapidly prototype a new app
- Enrich an existing dataset within a spreadsheet or table on Airtable with data from third party APIs
- Create complex HTML/React/Vue.js based views and reports based on data from numerous different data sources (e.g. various Airtable tables and/or Google Sheets spreadsheets, API GET requests, etc.)
Then you're in the right spot!
Continue on, as we'll talk a little bit about the format of this documentation and what you can expect as you read through it.
This documentation is broken up in an almost tutorial-based walkthrough, instead of a dry "look up this, look up that" type of documentation that you'd find all across the web.
Our goal is that by the end of this guide, you will know your way around SheetDream and you'll be able to:
- Successfully connect your Google Sheet(s) or Airtables
- See your data populate within the SheetDream admin interface
- Be able to interact with your new API, and perform advanced queries on the data
- Know how to setup external APIs as data sources, incorporating external data into your sheets
- Display your data live on your website with some autogenerated HTML
The moment you fire up SheetDream, you will be looking at a series of tabs. SheetDream's tabs are ordered in a very specific way. They are ordered for you to work from left-to-right, much like you would within a wizard style interface:
You would start with the Data Sources tab, once you're finished there moving on to the Tables & Activity tab, and so on.
In this documentation, you will see pages corresponding to each tab, and each of these will have sub-pages underneath them detailing the various features and tools at your disposal.
At any point when you are in the SheetDream admin interface and you're wondering about something on the particular tab you're looking at, you can open up this documentation and navigate it the exact same way you would navigate SheetDream, for some consistency.
SheetDream is currently in beta: and that means this documentation is prone to change as much as the software does behind the scenes. Our hope is that we don't have to change the structure too much and that things remain very clear and easy to read, and we will work very hard to make sure that is the case!
Last modified 9mo ago