Hello and happy holidays from everyone here at Grist Labs!
2024 saw our team expand its size and borders, with further international collaboration leading up to the first-ever Grist Summit in Paris – look out for more information from that in the coming weeks!
As always, we’re so thankful for our community, which includes new users, veterans, and code contributors.
Grist grows
- 🫂 Over 300 Discord community members. Join them (and us!) for support and fancy user showcases.
- 👋 We started hosting semi-regular Grist 101 webinars, which have been increasingly popular and – according to feedback – quite helpful for new users.
- 🤩
grist-coreis up to 7.4k GitHub stars. This doesn’t matter too much but there are so many great star emojis. ✨🌟💫
New features
These are some of the bigger features that landed in 2024:
Forms – The first version of Grist Forms released was released in January, with subsequent releases adding more features and fixing bugs. We use Grist for a lot internally, and used Forms to handle RSVPs for the Summit!
Admin console for self-hosters – There is now an ever-expanding admin console to help console admins (sorry).
Cumulative functions – it turns out Grist’s unique structure uniquely benefits from a comprehensive set of cumulative functions (PREV() & RANK()) and find methods.
Two-way references – a feature that required a lot of plumbing, but adds a lot of flexibility to Grist’s relational nature. As they say, two ways are better than one!
Audit logs for Grist Business users – Maybe not the most exciting feature, but proper audit logs something that certain organizations definitely need.
Hidden gems
Smaller features that drastically improve Grist, but leave a smaller footprint:
In April, we added the ability to filter reference and choice dropdown lists. If you know you know.
You can now enhance the dynamism of your data with draggable conditional styles.
Our standalone desktop version for Grist has grown up with significant updates over the past year, now behaving more like a normal desktop app.
Attention benchmarkers, Python optimizers or horologists: our detailed formula timer lets you put your formulas to the test.
You can now use rich formatting via Markdown within text columns. Nice.
It’s now easier than ever to add custom widgets to the built-in list in self-hosted installations. Want to be included in the main gallery, let us know!
Our new custom widget builder custom widget may indeed be a major feature, as we’ve already seen several advanced widgets making use of the very meta tool with a mouthful of a name.
Blog highlights
Community contributions
Last year there were more community members, and accordingly way more community contributions. Lest we try to list them all in what should be a brisk roundup, enjoy this lovely collage of other people’s work and make sure to check out our Showcase forum (and monthly newsletters) for more!
Also, if you’ve made a great widget and want to share it in the gallery, please post about it in the Showcase forum and let us know!
A HUGE thank you to everyone who shares something with us. It helps immeasurably.
As always, our GitHub roadmap is the best way to keep track of what’s on the docket for next year, though we suggest you paradoxically expect some surprises.
Happy new year!
