Building your first app from a spreadsheet is one of the most satisfying moments in no code work. Within an hour you can turn a tidy sheet into something that looks and feels like a real phone app. This lesson walks through the general steps using tools such as Glide, AppSheet and Power Apps as examples. Their menus differ, but the ideas are the same.
The tools, briefly
- AppSheet (from Google) builds apps from Google Sheets, Excel or Smartsheet. Its documentation describes tables, views such as table, gallery, form, map and dashboard, and security filters that limit which rows each user can see.
- Glide builds apps from sheets and its own tables, and apps can be shared by link and added to a phone's home screen.
- Power Apps (from Microsoft) is common in organisations that use Microsoft 365, often with SharePoint lists or Excel.
- Softr builds apps and portals on top of Airtable and other sources.
Check each tool's current plans page before choosing, because who can use an app and how you share it can depend on the plan.
Step by step
1. Prepare the sheet. One tab per kind of record, headings in row one, an ID column, consistent types. Add five to ten realistic rows so the builder can guess column types and you can see what screens look like.
2. Connect it. In the builder, create a new app and choose your sheet. The builder reads each tab as a table and suggests screens.