People and businesses everywhere use spreadsheets. They help us manage budgets and spending. They store and sort our data, and we use them for all sorts of business administrative tasks. They aren’t anything fancy, but they work. Functionality is important, but does this ubiquitous tool need a facelift? Well, one Berlin-based startup thought it did.
Rows is an online spreadsheet platform that has built-in integrations and a live sharing experience that helps teams work faster.
The tool is a low-code platform, which means you don’t need to learn a coding language to use it. You can use the spreadsheet skills you already have to automate your workflows. Basic spreadsheet math, text, and logic functions like SUM, VLOOKUP, and INDEX are all supported. So, there really isn’t any learning curve, if any.
“Our purpose has always been to create tools that make computation accessible to everyone,” said Rows Co-Founder and CEO Humberto Ayres Pereira. “We want to allow the 1 billion Excel and Sheets users worldwide to easily build tools catering to their personal and professional needs without code and using a familiar interface — a spreadsheet!”
So, what makes Rows stand out? Here are a few things for starters.
It has built-in integrations that allow you to seamlessly connect to your favorite data services and business apps, such as Slack, Salesforce, Crunchbase, Twitter, and Instagram. With each integration, you can set custom functions so you can automatically send and retrieve data within your spreadsheets. By connecting your core tools and managing them in a single spreadsheet, you can eliminate writing a custom script or installing a plugin.
It’s easy to collaborate using Rows. You can create workspaces and invite your team members so you can work together as a team. Together you can build and edit the spreadsheets in real-time, and you can also add interactive elements like buttons and checkboxes.
If you’d like to see how your spreadsheet will look, you can easily toggle between editing and live mode. When your spreadsheet is complete, you can make it live by turning it into an interactive web app, report, or dashboard that you share with anyone on mobile or desktop.
If you don’t know where to begin, Rows has pre-built templates for everyday tasks to get you started. There are templates for marketing, sales, HR, finance, etc. These templates are installed and customized to fit your needs.
The facelift Rows gives to your average spreadsheet looks pretty cool, and it’s something Pereira says we need today. “Excel is pre-internet, and Google Sheets, as developed as it is, is pre this API world and pre-app economy,” said Pereira. “Rows is built for today with integrations and shareable web apps.”
The all-in-one approach where your spreadsheet integrates with the apps you need to automate work, analyze data, and turn those cells of columns and rows into a neat web app you can share is the upgrade I think we’ve been looking for.
Recently, the company announced the results from their Series B funding led by venture capital firm, Lakestar. The company raised $16 million in the round, which they plan on using to invest in the platform and use for sales and marketing purposes.
Veronica Garcia has a Bachelor of Journalism and Bachelor of Science in Radio/TV/Film from The University of Texas at Austin. When she’s not writing, she’s in the kitchen trying to attempt every Nailed It! dessert, or on the hunt trying to find the latest Funko Pop! to add to her collection.
