What Apps can you Build with AppSheet?

[Music] app sheets an industry-leading no code platform that has tons and tons of potential so the question for you is does it have enough potential to meet my needs I'm gonna take this video to talk broadly about the app sheet platform and its capabilities this is a longer video because actually you can do a lot and there's a lot that you may need to consider to determine if absolute is the right fit for you because this is a longer form video down in the description I've got time stamps for different parts and segments of the video covering the various topics and points that you might be particularly interested in if you just want a quick summation hop to the end of the video where I kind of give my concluding thoughts and then you can bounce back to the other sections that may have been more interesting to you based on my concluding thoughts so thank you for watching and I hope this helps you make a great informed decision on your no code solution provider so here we're looking at a example of a pretty robust project management system ERP for a small business type of application this app covers CRM functionality it covers project management it covers time tracking document generation contract follow-up invoice creation all sorts of stuff as well as linking to other applications that the business might find useful in different cases so we're going to kind of explore behind the scenes of this application and you know take a look at what makes this functionality valuable and what we can and can't do inside of app seed so first things first what type of data can you connect to Apps sheet so app sheet supports connections to most cloud data sources cloud spreadsheets such as Google Drive office 365 smartsheet Dropbox box but you can also connect business grade data sources such as Microsoft sequel server my sequel Postgres sequel basically anything that's in a tabular data format you can bring in to app sheet and make a data source to power your application you also have something called an au data connector which allows you to connect to certain types of API data layers that are built with the au data framework moreover an app sheet data sources are able to be relationally connected and actually gets most of its visual functionality and visual interfaces from your data and how its relationally connected to other datasets inside of your application so most business applications are based on this simple data relationship principle so it covers a wide variety of use cases inside of a business from a user interface standpoint app sheet allows you to build intuitive data-driven and even automated user interface for your applications this is a little bit different than some platforms that may be drag-and-drop or you have to write HTML or some sort of Swift or Java to generate your user interfaces actually takes a step out of the process for us by understanding that most user interfaces and business applications look very similar to a handful of different forms that are populated by tabular data and so app sheet is distilled for us kind of about a dozen key view types you have your table views like a spreadsheet you have your single record views you have calendar views charts maps dashboards of multiple views put together you also have some more fancy views such as decks cards and galleries that allow you a little bit more design leverage to build something that's visually interesting or kind of communicates your point in an intuitive fashion so each of these views is put together automatically by AB sheet you just kind of point it to a data source and it generates the view automatically and you have some different options for customization of these types of views so we're looking at a table view here I can change the sorting order the column order I can do some grouping and aggregation --zz change some user experience elements around with the column width there are also some very interesting quick edit features so you can interact with it similar to a spreadsheet things like that form entry user interface components are controlled actually at the table level so instead of in the user interface menu your main controls are actually at the the table level so you would open a table and go in and you're going to assign a data type to each of these fields and these data types extend beyond just standard database data elements like integer or var car or something like that you can see there's a few dozen different data types and these data types are actually attached to a certain type of UI so we can see here that progress is an inaho much sort for enumerated list and if I look at the properties here you know I've given a few options pending agreed fulfilled canceled and we see that that populates over here in this form pending agreed fulfilled canceled so app sheet has the ability to generate lists from other tables you have different types of numerical inputs that you can have some customized control over various buttons true/false fields and some very interesting fields like signature capture drawings photo uploads mapping fields we're dropping latitude longitude pins or dropping pins on a photo or an another type of image that you want to indicate some specific you want to tag this record to that part of the image so actually it has a wide variety of built-in UI components for foremen and data entry that you can take advantage of covers the basis for most business circumstances and use cases the big win here is you're doing a small trade off for user interface customization but gaining a lot of time saved this saves hundreds of hours in the development process because app creators don't have to think about what is an intuitive design how far pixel wise should I space things what type of format should I use fonts colors design schemes all of these things that take a long time to code take a long time to put together even an drag-and-drop type of applications you spend a lot of time fine-tuning these views and oftentimes most app creators that are close to the business logic they're not really equipped with the the design principles and foundations to make these apps or to make really efficient user interfaces so this takes a lot of that risk out and it saves a lot of time it helps you focus on the business problem so we have our data we have our views app sheet also allows us to insert very complex logic into the application at almost every level so as you're going throughout the app editor you're going to find we're gonna open up one table and kind of look at our fields in this table you'll find areas where there's a little flask next to it that just means you can insert logical expressions right there and so we have one here that simply says hey reach into the parent record because this is relationally connected to a client reach into the client record and return their Google Drive folder ID into this field and so that's just a simple mechanism there for pulling some data from another table we have here return the year value from a date field this looks very similar to something you might find in Google sheets and in their cell formulas it's meant to be a declarative friendly logic layer logic experience for people that are in the business world it's very spreadsheet-like but it's extremely powerful you can do all sorts of calculations anything short of calculus ab sheet supports in terms of its mathematical functions lots of date texts boolean values list generation pulling data from other tables filtering all sorts of stuff including deep linking so this helps build custom navigation that maybe you know navigation between two different apps you tabs or filter views inside of your existing apps you tab there's a deep linking architecture that you can build out here in these different formulas you can also use these logical expressions in other places such as filtering out data coming in from your connected data sources so if you want users to only see certain information you can put security filters on a table to say hey I want the user to only see information that they've created or if their user role is X Y or Z show them this information or give them read or write or delete access you're able to configure basically an infinite amount of custom user roles inside of apps sheet so that you can have a very specific user interaction model for a variety of user types using an application you can also use that logical expression language to modify form fields so that there's conditional validation on forms so if I'm going to add a contract to this particular project it says hey this entry isn't valid you could customize that message maybe it's invalid because that's this client doesn't have that project associated to them along with the logic layer app sheet gives you the ability to create automations and your user workflows so a common business process is hey I need you to fill out this form this form used to go to this person for approval we need to scan a copy of that and save it in our Dropbox and then I need to once it's approved it needs to go back to the creator and they need to be notified that that's approved actually can help automate those workflows and process automation with their behavior tools so looking at a particular workflow we can see that let's see here every time a hourly contract is created so target data the contracts table update event adds an updates and maybe some special condition we're going to send an email to this person we're gonna fill out some email content based on raw data from our application and we actually have an attachment template here that goes to a Google Doc that has merge fields all over the document so you come out with a formatted PDF attachment and this email that you could then store in Google Drive or something like that so this automated document generation is extremely useful for inter business scenarios you can generate all sorts of attachments you can do PDF Excel files CSV JSON bodies text files you can also use these workflows to send push notifications to your users text messages to your users change some data in your application or send information to a third party system via an API web hook so let's say you have you want to assign documents with DocuSign you can send data from app sheet to DocuSign pretty fill some document and then have that sent out to the customer or whatever want to work whatever type of workflow you want to put together Apps sheet allows this this external web hook to be sent off from various types of actions within the app that allow you to connect external services and take advantage of the wide array of third party platforms and open api's that are out there to achieve that functionality that you're looking for if it's not built into AB sheet and again as I mentioned earlier a new code platform allow to create not just one application but really a suite or an ecosystem of applications across your business and so sending data from one application to another sharing data sources deep linking your users across your apps to help manage you know clean user flows throughout your business processes is totally achievable and totally doable inside of apps sheet actually that's actually trying to democratize machine learning as well and so they allow you to generate predictive models inside of your application that helps you do things like determine if a value is incorrect based on a larger body of knowledge that this records submitted by a user with an outlier or do things like OCR which is optical character recognition so scanning paper forms and training a computer algorithm to recognize what data is where and how to assign it to your data model so this is really powerful for businesses that are using paper forms because they have a legacy ERP and they have to use these paper forms for shipping or accounting or reconciliation and so being able to scan those into the app pull that data in and make it manageable and automated that's extremely valuable to a lot of business use cases so app sheet is really growing leaps and bounds and this machine learning component and so there's a lot of really cool value here now and more coming in the future there's also a handful of other notable features app sheet apps are by default cross-platform so they can work on Android be deployed in the Google Play Store and incidentally on iTunes as well you can also run them in the browser of any mobile device or on a laptop so they can work fullscreen on a computer or handheld on your mobile device the UI is responsive automatically based on the device you're using apps you tabs are also offline first meaning they have an industry-leading offline capability which is amazing for field operations or when users are going in and out of cell signal it helps maintain a consistent user experience regardless of cellular service or Wi-Fi so this is super important for a lot of business use cases apps sheet apps are sock to data compliant so they have top-level security control you're able to obscure information encrypt data on the device and PDF and images they have a lot of security features that make it robust and applicable to just about any business case that you can think of you can do custom authentication normally apps you'd apps are authenticated through whatever cloud provider you have brought your data sources in with so it kind of uses their ooofff mechanism from that data source but you can also have your own setup using tools like octa to build your own a custom authentication portals for your applications which is really useful in certain circumstances and actually it also has a suite of tools for maintaining data governance with a team of app creators so oftentimes businesses will bring on apps you as a platform they'll spin up three four five six app creators or distribute the tool to anybody in the organization to build their own apps because it is that approachable of a tool but you know IT administrators want to make sure that these apps are compliant with data policies and they're using the proper authorized data sources and not having permissions that are going to be dangerous or cause data loss and so there is a team governance package that you can get to allow IT infrastructure to kind of have hierarchical control or insight into how people are building their apps so we've talked about what apps you can do but where are the limitations on this platform so first let's talk about just general use cases that aren't really a good fit for apps sheet the number one and number two use cases that I frequently find or not the right don't have a good fit with app sheet our software as a service application so if you're looking to develop a multi-tenant software as a service tool that you're going to sell and monetize app sheets infrastructure because of its authentication method and the way it accesses your data and it's a licensing model it's not really designed to support software-as-a-service use cases so if you're trying to monetize the software if you can prototype an app sheet it's a great way to prototype the base functionality start working with your data models and fine-tuning some of that stuff giving a few beta testers in there to validate some of your hypotheses but you would eventually go to another platform to build a production environment for that application the other use case is point-of-sale so this kind of encompasses I guess absolutes main technical limitation which is there's not an a way for you to have a dynamic restful communication on the client side of the application so what that means like typically a point-of-sale you have to submit some credit card information you're gonna send it to a restful service it's gonna return you know a transaction success or credit card denied or something like that and then there are there's you know a workflow process that you have to go through and build on the user interface side to facilitate these successful transactions apps you can't facilitate a direct response from a restful api at the moment and that's because of its offline architecture like we talked about earlier but so when you think about use cases like point-of-sale or things where you really need that dynamic restful api communication those use cases usually fall outside of the realm of app sheet again if you're gonna do restful api you want to have a loop where you're sending information to your third-party service for map sheet and then processing that back sending the result back to the database and then that can be viewed again inside of your app sheet application so again you have to have a full loop going on in order to handle that data transaction public applications are usually not the best fit for rap sheet actually does have a public district you should model for their licenses but that is more for small cohorts people that you can handle the authentication with so maybe they are business partners or common vendors that you use and then you want a publicly accessible portal for them to access their information but there is already some sort of established business relationship there and so it's easy to attack in either a supplementary licensing fee or just an onboarding process but if you're thinking general public applications where they need to access their own data and not see everybody's data or not just a form capture application so you can have a public forum capture that is totally acceptable but apps use licensing model is not built to support thousands of users that are signing themselves up to your application and you know seeing their own data so that's like strictly outside of business that's business to consumer those really aren't apps that actually supports very well one more technical limitation is connecting to data sources like MongoDB or no sequel databases app sheet is predicated on a tabular data structure and environment and so connecting to no sequel data sources can be a little bit difficult so you're basically going to have to connect them to some sort of ode data protocol API and then connect that API into Apps sheet so that's a little more technical legwork that you're gonna have to do on the backend or set up some sort of proxy for that data to get it into a tabular form so it can be consumed and interacted with from your app sheet apps so let's say you've built a great app sheet application and now you're running into some walls and limits with either user interface components or things that you want to do with your data that actually doesn't support out of the box with its actions workflows and you know logical expressions so options for extendibility on top of app sheet start in the database so if you're using Google sheets you can interact with Apps Script or have different code driven events or formula driven events happen inside of your spreadsheet so that will allow you to add that extra layer of logic and data transformation you can even interact with Apps Script from a web hook there are different ways to kind of call functions if you deploy an app script as a web app executable so a sheet is also working on some more codified or documented methods for interacting with Apps Script those are going to be out soon if you're connecting to a SQL type data source you have options of creating view layers and pointing your app sheet data sources to your sequel views instead of the actual sequel tables again that gives you a lot of flexibility with column order with calculated fields with column naming and security and access to those database records you can also execute stored procedures through triggers so you can either call a third party service to set up some sort of API gateway where you set up an endpoint and that endpoint is going to run a stored procedure and your database so you know the change is going to happen an app she taps can actually is going to send a web hook to that API endpoint and then run that procedure in the database alternatively you can put together triggers in the database that will call those stored procedures on add update delete type of events inside your data and then those database operations are usually performed very quickly and are often available in the app almost instantly after you submit the record change so let's say you're going to you're going to have a form that has a multi selectable column that you're going to scan and it's going to populate a comma separated list of SKUs or you know some sort of bar codes that you're scanning in so you scan a hundred things and you want to save this record and generate a hundred new inventory items in your inventory application so you would save that record that would go to the database there's a trigger that parses it out and loops through that comma separated list and begins to build out all those associated records most of the time that happens in less than a second and that information is quickly available inside your app sometimes even during the sync process it's already finished and bloats loads right back in or populates very quickly if you have a live internet connection so with that said we're really only scratching the surface of what apps you can do actually it's designed to support thousands of different unique business application use cases so it is a tool to allow you to take your creativity to solve business problems and make it reality we've seen that with hundreds of customers that have had incredible success building all sorts of applications and and using the tool in very creative ways to solve their business problems we found that basically 99% of the time users have been able to solve these critical and valuable business problems with app she'd not always the way they first envisioned it because again it is a no code platform so there are limitations there is a sort of framework that you have to play within but there is so much that you can do inside that framework and we have seen just a handful I mean I can probably count it on one hand the number of applications that were not a fit for apps sheet so very very very few business use cases are not the fit again I've told you about the use cases that generally don't fit and so we usually screen those out early on but once we start a project with somebody it almost always turns out to be extremely worth it the price to go the price in dollars and it in time to go to a the next level custom code base to extend the tool further would be usually 10x time and 10x cost of what it was to manage and run and build the app sheet applications and that's because they are so agile you are able to change your applications logic and layout in just a matter of minutes and so you can respond to changes in your business or changes requests from your users almost instantaneously and so that type of agility that type of flexibility is really unparalleled in the market right now and it's just providing tremendous value to customers so again I highly recommend you try out this platform and again if you need any help we are here to help you training consulting development assistance we love to help people find success on the App Sheet platform thanks for listening and I hope you take advantage of this great tool accrued technologies we love helping people get great value out of apps sheet we do that through offering professional services and helpful content like this to stay up to date like and subscribe and we're always trying to improve so leave us your thoughts in the comments thanks for watching

Channel: AppSheet Training

Views: 15,344

Keywords: AppSheet, Google App Maker, SQL, Make an App, Google Sheets, App Development, AppSheets

Id: JxiSeoQWrw8

Length: 27min 37sec (1657 seconds)

Published: Thu Feb 20 2020