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

Creating a new app from your own data

Considering your data is in the right format as a Google Sheets spreadsheet, let’s create your first app using it. Log in to AppSheet, and you will arrive on the My Apps page. AppSheet quite frequently changes its UX; the following figure shows what it looks like at the time of writing:

Figure 2.4 – The My Apps page

As the name suggests, this page presents the list of the apps you have created, or apps that you have been added to as a co-author.

Now, let’s create a new app by following these steps:

  1. Click the Create button in the upper-left corner of this page. When you click on it, you will see two different options, Start with existing data and Start with a template.
  2. Select the Start with existing data option. Then, a dialog box appears where you are asked to name the app you are going to create and to select a category out of the list.
  3. Click the Choose your data button at the bottom...