Glide Pages -First look
The first question I had was could you embed the page in a web page?
This is a wordpress site and I’ve used an iFrame to display below, this is using an iFrame plugin:
As you can see the page is blocked from view.
There is also an embed shotcode as well and using this you just get a URL link that you need to click on to see.
[embed_] https://curved-fire-8785.glide.page/dl/d0a5f4/s/d0a5f4[/embed]https://curved-fire-8785.glide.page/dl/d0a5f4/s/d0a5f4
So they are a standalone webpages, if you want to display a page then maybe an image that you click to take you to that page. In WordPress insert image and then add URL link to it. Demo below:
So you can add a URL link from a web page to open the Glide.page up in another tab.
The Glide.Page is interactive so you can setup templates for others to use, as discussed in the glide.pages video for an approval process for staff for sales collected in the field. So you can setup a different interface for the data for using it in-office for managing information from mobile apps.
There are aspects of this that are similar to Notion & AirTables where you are slicing and dicing the data in different ways, and using Google sheets or Glide Tables as the back-end. Apparently Excel & Airtable will be linked in the future.
It’s a great idea as it allows for interaction with the data on a PC.
Printing
One issue I wondered about was printing, or using the data elsewhere, taking it out to display information in reports, or querying a line item and referring it to someone else.
I looked at grabbing the text off the screen and using it elsewhere, you can’t select the information, and I tried using Textify to get a selection and it will only select one cell/item at a time.
I was able to use the browser printer to print the data to PDF but not an elegant solution as it has all the scribble in the corners of the page, but at least there is an output.
Data in/out of Glide Tables
I added a query to the Forum on the topic and while writing wondered about getting data out of Glide Tables.
The tables are, I think, faster than Google Sheets but you can’t import into Glide Tables (there was a post where someone was using a python script to be able to do that) but generally you can’t.
But you can export the data and it comes out as a .ods file
Apache OpenOffice is a free, open-source alternative to Microsoft Office. To save money yet still produce Office-compatible documents. It can be opened in Excel & Google Sheets, so that’s handy.
Using as a business or enterprise tool
I think the web.pages are great, they allow a link between mobile remote out of office and office integration for oversight and management of data. It can help non technical people use the tools to do work on the apps.
I’m just backtracking here for a moment. When you create a new app in glide you get the choice of Mobile App or Web.page. So it seems its one or the other. So if you want both linked to a dataset then it has to be google sheets as a data source as you cannot access the data from inside an apps glide table, unless they expand this functionality later.
A Slightly slower app in the field and a good backend with Google Sheets which you can pull data from live and build reports in other spreadsheets (thereby keeping the original sheet light on data and faster to load ) using IMPORTRANGE so you can setup a 2nd spreadsheet with all the reporting setups for Graphs and ranges of data. You could also use Coupler.io to do this, see this article.
Business perspective
As you are notionally using the mobile version to collect data and then processing it in the main business, the Google Sheets back end is the more flexible solution (I think the only solution at this time)
Also, if you updated prices on items and wished to do an update for the Mobile app interface, then Google sheets is better for this too. As you can do bulk updates whereas with Glide Tables you’d need to manually change fields one by one (I’m not certain of this).
Personal use case
I haven’t quite figured a specific use case where I’d use the link & then thought about the Small Business Template I created for a Barbers shop that sold time slots for services.
I looked at how you could display the data, using concatenate to join a number of fields so that more information could easily be displayed.
Video of the review:
End comment
After playing with AppGyver yesterday and the disappointment of that, I have really enjoyed exploring and using the Glide pages. I can see a real use case for this in a business process.
I’ll need to think of how I’d use it in a future app but its interesting in that Google sheets have become relevant again with the app.
