Book Image

Democratizing Application Development with AppSheet

By : Koichi Tsuji, Suvrutt Gurjar, Takuya Miyai
Book Image

Democratizing Application Development with AppSheet

By: Koichi Tsuji, Suvrutt Gurjar, Takuya Miyai

Overview of this book

Many citizen developers regularly use spreadsheets in their business and day-to-day jobs. With AppSheet, you can take your spreadsheets to the next level by enhancing their ease of use. The platform allows you to run your business efficiently and manage it in the field outside of an office or indoor environment. This book enables you to create your own simple or medium to complex hybrid apps for business or personal use. As a beginner to AppSheet, this book will show you how the AppSheet Editor works and how it is used to configure, test, and deploy an app and share it with others as users or co-authors. You’ll learn about widely used features such as how to use data sources, create app views and actions, construct expressions with AppSheet functions, and make your app secure through security and UX options. Next, you’ll create email/attachment templates and develop reports/documents based on templates, store in the cloud, and send files through emails. You’ll also understand how to integrate third-party services and monitor various usage statistics of your app. As you progress, you’ll explore various features with the help of sample apps that you create using the book. By the end of this book, you’ll have learned how to make the most of AppSheet to build powerful and efficient applications.
Table of Contents (20 chapters)
1
Part 1 – Introduction and Getting Started
3
Part 2 – App Editor and Main Features
10
Part 3 – Advanced Features and External Services
14
Part 4 – App Templates and Tricks for App Building

Understanding App Editor and Data Sources

With a Google account in hand, you are now ready to start building your first app. In this chapter, we will discuss the process of creating a new app from your own data and how to configure table and column settings. An AppSheet app is built from your own data sources, usually a Google Sheets or Excel spreadsheet. Therefore, the first step of building a new app is to prepare your data. Once the data is ready, you are fully ready to create a new app with AppSheet.

Once a new app is created, the whole development process will happen in the AppSheet editor. With this chapter, you will learn how your spreadsheet data should be organized so that it can be used as a data source with AppSheet. We often see cases where the app creator wrongly models data tables, which will cause a number of problems when you develop your apps. To avoid this problem, proper data modeling is important.

You will learn the basics of setting table and column configurations...