More and more these days I’m thinking of powerful ways to use Google Sheets for business needs. I recently created an “App” of sorts using only Google Sheets.
The project requirements were to maintain a future schedule for the main meeting in my church. I’m responsible for planning this meeting, which includes finding people to say prayers, people to speak, and hymns to sing.
The problem I had to solve was to allow the people responsible for different parts of the planning to communicate with each other (real time) while reducing the possibility of someone overriding another’s data and keeping some sensitive information private.
The solution was three Google Sheets that talk to each other. I have a sheet for themes and music that is populated by the music people. I have the planning document (with sometimes sensitive/private data) that I use to record future speakers and prayers; this document pulls in the themes and music (real time). And last, I have a program document that dynamically shows the next three weeks of the schedule so programs can be made.
It works like a charm. I’ve only found one issue; if someone opens the main document on a mobile phone and they close it before the sheet calculates, it breaks the formulas and shows errors in the program document. The work around is to replace the formulas with values if a week is totally planned.
