Hello and happy holidays from everyone here at Grist Labs!
In addition to shipping new features, we spread our wings to get the word out about what makes Grist special, like with Spreadsheet Makeover and GristCon.
We also looked inward – exposing some of our deepest spreadsheet secrets for all to see with our Grist Secrets and How Grist uses Grist webinars.
Read about all of these and more in this year’s recap!
Visual learner?
To view this post in webinar form, check out our 2025 year in review webinar for an interactive walkthrough of almost all the features mentioned!
Grist by the numbers (of people)
- Our
grist-coreGitHub stars went from to 7.4k to over 10.3k. We’re still trying to find a way to convert these stars into goods and services, but in the meantime they decorate our virtual planetarium and dazzle us daily. - We went from 300 to over 1,000 Discord community members, and even hosted an entire virtual conference there! Join them (and us!).
Grist for the people
GristCon 2025
We held our first (but not last!) virtual conference in September, with 10+ talks and sessions by Grist Labs employees and community members.
We even managed to record and upload the results! Check out the recordings here.
Spreadsheet Makeover
Our co-CEO Anais dove into the world of grid-based content creation with a series of Spreadsheet Makeovers. By vicariously watching spreadsheets that aren’t yours get assessed and improved, you can sneakily improve your own Grist skills.
Grist by the people
This year we were once again supported by an amazing community that takes advantage of Grist and all its flexibility to assemble and share an ever-growing toolbox. We’ve started capturing community-contributed widgets in this Grist document, but we also see lots of cool things shared on Discord and our Showcase forum.
Featured features
Assistant upgrades
Our powerful but unobtrusive AI Assistant can now create, modify and analyze your data in addition to helping build Python formulas.
External attachments
Push the limits of Grist attachments without pushing Grist.
Admin controls for Enterprise
A spreadsheet to manage your spreadsheet management.
Comments and Notifications
Talk to each other, highlight cells and receive notifications.
Accessibility improvements
The credit for this important work goes to Emanuel Pelletier, who’s made so many improvements that we had to add a new infopane (hit F4).
Suggestions
A whole new way to collaborate on relational data. A version of version control. Structured and sanitized data crowdsourcing. More to come in 2026…
How about a quick list of other 2025 features/improvements that didn’t make the cut: improved link previews, duplicating widgets, row height controls, document tours tutorials, attachment pasting, user presence, F O C U S M O D E, saving page collapse state, hidden and prefilled fields for Forms, lots of date shortcuts, a service accounts API, self-hosted user and document disabling.
Webinar highlights
One of the best parts about doing a monthly webinar is how we’re compelled to both dig deep into Grist’s inner workings, but also reactively respond to what users are asking about or working on at any given moment. This led to some unusually introspective exposes where everyone who works on Grist shared their trips, tricks, workflows and nightmares. It also gave us a long-due opportunity to spotlight user-created custom widgets.
2026
There are two things to look out for as we head into the next year: the next iteration of GristCon and our experimental Suggestions feature. We say this not only to build excitement, but because we want your input on both! Do you have a pitch for the next GristCon? Have you played around with Suggestions? A complaint about either? Please get in touch via our Contact page or on Discord!
As always, you can check our GitHub roadmap to see some of what we’re working on, though rest assured the “labs” part of Grist Labs is and has always been important.
Happy new year!
