Ability to add button or hyperlink to a form in workspace

šŸ’” Suggestions & ideas
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Ability to add a button or code a cell so that it can open up one of the forms you have in your workspace. For instance, on the quote template if you had a related sheet called ā€œCustomerā€ with an associated form to add a new customer. Then on your quote sheet, you could place a button to add a new customer. The button or URL would be the URL as defined for the form that you have created.

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Glenn, welcome to the forum!

This is an important topic as it touches many upcoming features and direction of the platform.

  1. Buttons - Yes we plan to introduce Buttons in the product. People have already asked for it. Current thinking is that Buttons could be Sheet Level and Row Level.

An example of a Sheet Level button is a ā€˜New Ticketā€™ button which pops up a Form Dialog to create a new Row in a ā€˜Helpdesk Ticketsā€™ Sheet.
An example of a Row Level button is a ā€˜Approveā€™ button which pops up a Form Dialog to approve a Leave Application and then kick off a business workflow (Automation) with mails being sent, records being updated in other HR/Finance systems etc.
Note that Buttons need not all open Form Dialogs, but some could just be kicking off Automations in the cloud.

Though I cannot comment on the timeline now, Buttons feature will follow - not sure how immediately though - the rollout of our much anticipated Automations feature-set.

  1. ā€˜New Customerā€™ Button - We are weeks away from releasing Inline editing of ā€˜Related Rowā€™ type cells - and with type-ahead completion. So you would be able to type and see matching existing Customers in a dropdown and choose from them OR create a new one from the cell itself.

This is a UX pattern we see in a lot of CRM/ERP style applications.

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  1. Ability to Specify a Form Dialog - Ability to Specify a particular Form View to appear on click of a Button is something we are considering supporting as well. So that one could use a particular Form Dialog for New and another one for Update/Modify etc.

  2. Invoice ā†’ Customer Relationship.
    Finally, the example that you gave is an Invoice ā†’ Customer relationship. This is a feature / function that is still on the anvil. This is a Relationship type that is different from the currently supported Sheet-level Related Row relationship. Instead of each Row in this Sheet being related to one or more Rows of another Sheet, a Cell or a Range of Cells in this Sheet is Linked to one/more Rows in another Sheet.

When you fill in a Customer in an Invoice, you would expect other Customer details to be filled in automatically.

To do this, one would create an Invoice template the following way.
First Link a Cell with the Customer Sheet.
Then declare that cell as a Named Variable/Range - say Customer.
Then configure other cells ( such as Customer Name, Street Address etc. ) to look up the Customerā€™s columns using a Object Oriented formula syntax.
Iā€™m using a screenshot of a Vertex42 spreadsheet template to provide this example.

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Again, this is in our roadmap - but cannot provide guidance on the ETA at this point.

  1. Finally - Running invoicing in Spreadsheet.com.

To run a viable invoicing system, you would need the ability to

  • Create or customize invoice templates as described above
  • Mail the completed invoices as attachments and with payment instructions to customers
  • Convert estimates to invoices.
  • Ability to void erroneous invoices.
  • A Master Sheet where you can view / sort / filter / create / update all your Invoices / Estimates
    • This would be a special kind of Sheet which ā€˜containsā€™ and list a list of child Template Instances ( Invoices / Estimates )
  • Update invoices - Mark as paid , part paid etc.
  • Dashboarding and reporting around your outstanding, paid, monthly trends etc.
  • Iā€™m sure a few other things that Iā€™m missing.

So these are all things that are in our roadmap - some are fuzzy; on some we have a lot more clarity. Most are medium (months) to long term (more months) roadmap items.

And clearly, we will build these blocks on top of the platform with feedback from customers.

I think the theme here is that as we race to complete the foundation of a solid spreadsheet experience, we are also putting in place elements of a Low Code platform that people can use to build bespoke business applications (Invoicing, CRM, ERP, HR etc.) from rich Templates, Template-sets or from scratch.

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Hi Murali Mohan,
Above example is excellent use case. Do we know the ETAs for the above mentioned features.

Thanks,
Chandrasekhar.

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Hello @Chandrasekhar_D - Welcome to the forum. Buttons are near term priority - ~a few months - We will update here as the dates firm up.

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