Understanding the difference between Edit View and Live View

A introduction to Edit View and Live View—the two main views of a spreadsheet that you can share with others.

What does it mean for a spreadsheet to be "live"? Well, think of a spreadsheet as just another kind of interactive web app like Google Forms or Typeform. In those apps, you start off designing how you want your form or survey to look. When it's done, you put it online and share it with the target users. That's how Rows works too.

The Edit View is for people who design and maintain a spreadsheet.
The Live View is where your target users can interact with it (fill out forms, select options and so on).

The Difference Between Edit View and Live View in Rows

To understand the main differences between "Edit View and "Live View, see the following guidelines:

View	Description
Edit View	Contains the underlying functionality for your web app or form. Use this view to: Create Tables and form fields to store data that is entered by end users pulled from an external service. Create Pages to adjust the layout of your web app. Insert formulas that retrieve data and control the logic of your application or dashboard. Insert charts that help users analyze any data that your app produces.
Live View	The live version of your web app or form. This could be: a form that lets people participate in different workflows (such as surveys, vacation requests, expense reports) a dashboard that lets people pull reports for their preferred data points (such as website traffic for their selected dates or funding details for a company name that they've entered). However, in this view, users can't see or change any underlying functionality (such as formulas or hidden tables)

View

Description

Edit View

Contains the underlying functionality for your web app or form.
Use this view to:

Create Tables and form fields to store data that is

entered by end users
pulled from an external service.

Create Pages to adjust the layout of your web app.

Insert formulas that retrieve data and control the logic of your application or dashboard.

Insert charts that help users analyze any data that your app produces.

Live View

The live version of your web app or form. This could be:

a form that lets people participate in different workflows (such as surveys, vacation requests, expense reports)
a dashboard that lets people pull reports for their preferred data points (such as website traffic for their selected dates or funding details for a company name that they've entered).

However, in this view, users can't see or change any underlying functionality (such as formulas or hidden tables)

But I don't want to build a web app — can't I just use Rows as normal spreadsheet tool?

Sure you can! You don't have to worry about Live View if you don't intend to share your spreadsheet with others.

And even if you do want to work on the same spreadsheet with others, you don't have to use Live View either.

You can invite your colleagues to collaborate on the same spreadsheet in Edit View.
This is useful if different people need to add different parts of the data (such as different sales people entering the details for different leads).
You can also use forms and action elements (form fields) to make your formulas easy to work with in Edit View.

However...

Rows was built with collaboration in mind

We introduced the concepts of workspaces and "Live View" because we know that teams usually collaborate on spreadsheets together. Yet some spreadsheets can get pretty complex with interdependent tables and nested formulas.

People sometimes push the boundaries of what a spreadsheet is designed to do, so that it feels more like a web app. This is a problem for casual users who feel intimidated when they open an Excel workbook with 10 interdependent sheets that takes 5 minues to recalculate.

That's why we created two different views:

Edit View for the frequent spreadsheet creator
Live View for the colleagues of the frequent spreadsheet creator — those who are required to use their creations