How to use our View app to better share and export data from sheets!
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Spreadsheets are awesome. They are a sophisticated, powerful yet easy tool to store and manipulate data.
Their limiting weakness is making that data available for others to view. Sheets were never designed to be presentation tools, yet increasingly they are being used in this way. The primary drawback of sharing data is that sorts or filters are common to all users of your sheet. If you hide columns for your users, you also hide them for yourself. This can be incredibly frustrating if you are working on your sheets and another user filters the data (changing, in real-time, what you see). Filter Views or temporary filter views (for users who have read-only rights to your sheet) can help, but they take time to set up, don’t work on mobile devices and are often cumbersome.
With View, we wanted to tackle this problem a little differently. Using the Google Sheets API, we help you open the data from your sheets directly in your browser, filter it (remove rows, hide columns etc.) and then share this filter using nothing more than a simple link. You can email the link to a recipient, and they can view the filtered data only if they have permission to view the actual sheet. It’s a perfect way for others to view a relevant portion of a much larger spreadsheet, without you having to maintain multiple copies of the same data!
Making sharing parts (what we call views) of your Google Sheets quicker and easier:
All of this is delivered without modifying your original data in any way. In line with our zero knowledge approach to privacy, your sheets data never leaves the browser and is never, ever sent to us. For more information, read the instructions or click on the tutorial buttons below.
Showing and hiding columns with View.
Selecting, filtering and sharing your sheets data with View.
Exporting sheets data to other spreadsheet formats using View.
Selecting, filtering and sharing your sheets data with View.