Hello and happy holidays from everyone here at Grist Labs!

It was a big year for Grist. We gained more users than ever and shipped a bunch of features.

We also had the privilege of finding out how Grist is being used all over the world, from within the civil service to hobby groups to IT infrastructure management.

Highlights

  • 🌌 Our GitHub stars went from 3.4 to 5.6k – a 60% increase!
  • 🗣️ We were featured on Hacker News’ frontpage for the second time and got invaluable, unvarnished feedback as always.
  • 🇫🇷 We had the privilege to present Grist alongside ANCT at NEC 2023 in Bordeaux, to talk about open source and no-code tools, and the digital commons.
  • 💬 We launched our official Discord server to chat with our growing community.

Product milestones

Most importantly, Grist itself took a huge leap this year. Both internal work and community contributions have improved Grist drastically, not only polishing existing features but setting the groundwork for exciting developments (see some hints at the bottom of this post). Here are some highlights, limited to one per month:

translate

January – we started our Weblate project, and thanks to dozens of contributors are up to 21 active translations.

atr

February – we released the first version of Grist’s standalone Electron app.

team_dashboard

March – the launch of one of our most popular templates – Flashcards.

open_in_browser

April – we published our grist-static repo, letting you host .grist files without the full back-end.

webhook

May – Grist grows claws with better UI support for webhooks.

ads_click

June – in what became known as “the summer of selectors”, we added highlights for selector rows and made other improvements to widget linking.

smart_toy

July – though not as exciting or trendy as selectors, we launched our AI Formula Assistant.

table_view

August – building on grist-static – and in an effort to free the CSV – we released the Grist CSV Viewer.

calendar_month

September – the time finally came for us to release the official Grist calendar widget.

search

Octoberway too much happened this month, but let’s highlight formula lookups & shortcuts.

open_in_new

November – relational navigation within Grist got much easier with Record Cards.

how_to_vote

December – (rumbling noise heard in the distance) forms … forms … FORMS! … *FORMS!*

Community contributions

One of the best parts of Grist’s open-source principles is working with others across the globe who understand what we’re trying to do. We’d like to shout out some of the many community contributions over the year that greatly enhance the product and bring us tremendous inspiration:

Finally, a huge thanks to our collaborators at ANCT for their many PRs, and to all of our Weblate translation contributors.

2024 – What’s coming next

Our GitHub roadmap is the best way to keep track of what we’re actually working on, but here are a few topics that we’re constantly thinking about:

What's on Grist's brain: Easier self-hosting; WYSIWYS; Custom domains; Theming; Timezones.

Wait…what’s WYSIWYS? Ask us on Discord.

See you next year! 🫡