2024 W6 - Imagining the future

Every week I post about one thing that happened at Rows. We're building in public!

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This week I had another glimpse of the future of spreadsheets.

It happened when I was working on automating the dashboard we share with our investors.

There’s a section at the top of the first page where we create a summary of what’s going on every week.

It’s a repetitive task. Every week I try to give it some flair, but it boils down to the same stuff: Revenue, new accounts, etc. So I created a formula to fetch the info from each of the tables where it is and reproduce the text in a natural way. You can see it in the image below.

The dashboard, the Summary I write every monday, and the formula that automates it. FYI, it’s mock data.

The formula is NOT a simple one as you can see.

I think this may be the future of reports.

• Rows has invested quite a bit in our AI features already.

• I think the solution to the summary formula is to create a cool AI Template feature. You’d write the format of the summary once, and the AI will figure out all of the sub-formulas to fetch.

There’s probably quite a bit of work to get there.

But I think that’s the future.

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See you next week

Humberto