Search applications
Search applications, so you stop emailing the whole spreadsheet
Price lists, part catalogues, rate tables, member directories and product data usually live in a workbook that gets sent out as an attachment. Publish it as a search application instead and people find the one row they need, without receiving the other forty thousand.
What you actually hand over when you send the file
A spreadsheet is a poor delivery mechanism for a dataset, and the reasons have nothing to do with the data being wrong.
Sending the workbook
- Everything goes: cost columns, margins, discontinued lines, other customers’ pricing
- It is stale from the moment it leaves, and every recipient holds a different version
- Anyone can edit it, then quote from their edited copy
- No record of who opened it, searched what, or is still using last year’s file
- Forwarding it to a competitor takes one click
Publishing a search application
- People see the fields you expose and nothing else
- One dataset, always the current one, for everyone
- Read-only by design, so results cannot be quietly altered
- Access is per user or open to the public, and usage is visible
- The underlying workbook is never downloaded
What a search application lets people do
More than a filter box. The search itself can be driven by the logic already in your workbook.
Search and filter across the grid
Results appear in a grid with search and per-column filters, so a user can narrow forty thousand rows to the handful that matter without knowing anything about how the data is organised.
Criteria that change with the answer
Conditional logic adjusts which criteria are shown as selections are made, so choosing a product family reveals only the options that exist within it rather than every field at once.
Calculated results, not just stored ones
Because the workbook is still doing the work, a result can be computed rather than looked up: a price after volume breaks and customer terms, or a rate after the surcharges that apply.
Data from outside the workbook
Queries can pull from a database and refresh on load or on a button, so a catalogue can sit on current stock or live rates instead of a snapshot taken when the file was last saved.
Price lists are the common case
Almost every manufacturer and distributor maintains one in Excel, and almost every one of them emails it.
Thousands of items, one page
A price list with tens of thousands of rows becomes a page a rep or a dealer can search on a phone between appointments, rather than a file they have to open, scroll and hope is current.
Different prices for different people
Because access is per user, the same application can show list pricing to one group and contract pricing to another, without maintaining separate files for each customer.
Updated the way you already update it
Change the workbook in Excel and republish. The people who maintain the price list keep doing so in the tool they know, and everyone sees the new version at once.
Two of them, running right now
Built from ordinary workbooks. Open either one and search it.
Searchable product list
A product catalogue published as a page. Type to narrow thousands of rows to the ones that match, without downloading anything.
Multi-field search with dynamic dropdowns
A sales database where each selection changes what the next dropdown offers, so the criteria stay valid as you narrow them.
More live applications are in the gallery. The quickest way to judge this, though, is with your own file: upload it on the free tier and bind a grid to the table.
Turn the file everyone asks you for into a page
Start free and publish a searchable version of a dataset you already maintain, or tell us how big it is and who needs to see which parts, and we will tell you what it would take.