Connecting spreadsheets is like creating symlinks
Recently, at Sheetgo I realized that our approach to connecting spreadsheets is very similar to the concept of symbolic links (symlinks) which is very prominent in the Linux world. The idea of symlinks is simple. Instead of creating duplicates or copies of files, only keep one original and place a symlink wherever you want your original to be, too. Think of it as a reference to the original file.
Let’s look at an example. In my home directory on my local hard drive, I have a LibreOffice Calc spreadsheet document called “analysis-2016.ods”. I need the data of this document for a report I am working on in another folder called “Report 2017”. Instead of creating a copy of the analysis spreadsheet and pasting it into that folder, with symlinks I can leave the file where it is (in my home directory) and instead only create a reference (a symlink) in my report folder, pointing back to the source of the analysis spreadsheet.
Interesting concept, right? It took me a while to realize that what we do at Sheetgo is very similar. We don’t want people to copy and paste spreadsheet data manually. We don’t want them to send spreadsheets as email attachments.
In short, we don’t want people to create duplicated data anymore.
Instead, we help the user to create connections (symlinks) between any spreadsheet document located not locally but inside Google Drive. The Google Drive dependency has legacy reasons. We started Sheetgo as an add-on for Google Sheets because it was easy to develop. By now we came to realize the downsides of this sole cloud focus. Yes, we are slowly moving into the cloud, yet we remain with a long tail of locally used spreadsheets.
We need to address this offline need and have to evolve Sheetgo into a service that can create the symlinks needed between both worlds.
