Searching to migrate a complex excel workbook with loads of intelligence to something web based, easily developpable … Asked a colleague what he thought might be a good candidate to do this and pointed me out to nocodb.

Here’s how they sell it:

Build Databases As Spreadsheets : No-Coding Required

NocoDB allows building no-code database solutions with ease of spreadsheets. Bring your own database or choose ours! Millions of rows? Not a problem. Your Data. Your rules. You are in control.

Wow.

I did a crash course using their documentation for a brainless setup using docker and a SQLite backend.

Basically it’s this :

docker run -d --name nocodb \
-v "$(pwd)"/nocodb:/usr/app/data/ \
-p 8080:8080 \
nocodb/nocodb:latest

Then fired my browser to localhost on port 8080.

Created a database, several tables and linked them very easily in a super neat interface. Then well, realized that I can’t do automatic calculation and behavioral as I’d like. However it has awesome “views” that actually present the spreadsheets in a different way, making them less annoying and probably motivating people to fill them. They can be presented as Grids, Forms, Gallery, kanban and calendar.

It’s freaking awesome.