A tutor of the basic of appsheet

I am new at appsheet and need a tutor that will teach the basic and building a data app.
If you can put me through.

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@MultiTech_Visions Is who got me really going!

  1. The first, a compatible database design. Letโ€™s say you want to prepare a sales management for a company. The pertinent fields would be the customers, the sellers (of course any seller has to buy what they are selling, from someone else), the products being sold, and the numbers.

-> Keep separate sheets for customers (with columns such as name, area lived, the type of product he/she has an affinity for, contact and any other pertinent field), sellers (name, goods sold, etc), products (all relevant information). Every field would have a unique identifier (called the key) which is the unique ID that is your DNA within you.

Then a sales or buy record would require combination of above fields. A sales record will involve the customer name, the sales representative, the item sold, the branch of the bigger concern that it is sold from, if any; and of course the number, i.e the revenue from sales. Similar would be in time of buying.

So we can essentially โ€˜sortโ€™ data by customer (amount that he is sold over a period), by representative (amount he has sold over a period), by branch (total sales over a period), goods (no of items sold, amount generated by that particular item over a period) etc etc.

What you are doing as a good compatible Appsheet database designer is you are correctly visualising and implementing the โ€˜Anchorโ€™ points which would be the pivots around which data accumulate over time and can be analysed and projected.

Appsheet is a relational database management system.

  1. Tables are what you make from those sheets when you import them within Appsheet. You can break a large table into slices, based on various โ€˜filtersโ€™. Like you want the sales records from a database of just the previous month, then you can define a โ€˜sliceโ€™ from that large sales table with an appropriate โ€˜expressionโ€™ that appsheet understands.

  2. You make views from the tables. Tables are what are the backbone of the system, but they mean nothing unless we are able to visualise them. Views are what you see through your eyes on the screen. Letโ€™s say your sales table (within Google sheets or excel, itโ€™s a spreadsheet, but within appsheet, itโ€™s a table) contains fields as Key (the unique identifier of that particular sales record), Date, Customer, Sales Representative, Item, Amount.

You can define different views from the table.

a) The โ€˜formโ€™ view is for โ€˜writing intoโ€™ the table. It will show you all those column fields in a blank inputtable form, which will be entered on your discretion.
b) The โ€˜tableโ€™ view is for viewing those records that are entered through the form. Itโ€™s in the spreadsheet structure with rows stacked on top of one another.
c) A โ€˜detailโ€™ view is the view for a particular record rather than the whole table. Imagine it to be exactly like the form view but with all those fields filled out.
d) A โ€˜Deckโ€™ view is just like the table view, just a little fatter, allowing you to incorporate more detail without having to go inside the detail view everytime.

These four views are what will make the majority of your views within your app. There are options to place your views, on the main โ€˜taskbarโ€™, in the menu (like the three dashes of many apps), or behind the curtains as a reference view which can be called upon adhoc.

  1. Lastly there are actions. Actions allow you to modify data, navigate between views, trigger external services such as launching the dialpad with a phone number.

There are workflows, reports etc etc but letโ€™s not get too hung up with the color of the leaves before we build a fat healthy trunk.

Itโ€™s all about visualising and modifying and revisualising that modified data within your backend Google sheet with the tools this fantastic platform provides. It really helps to have some coding background like knowing how to use conditional operators and data types, but thatโ€™s not at all a necessity.

Whatโ€™s necessary is the will to learn and never give up.

You can inbox me if you want to.

P.S. I started off with Appsheet a year back when I was trying to use Google forms to incorporate a little bit of automation in the lengthy processes of construction project management. I didnโ€™t know anything, my database design was like hell, I used spreadsheet formulae to make the data according to my format and brought those computed spreadsheet tables inside of Appsheet that made it dead slow.

I had to pay to get on the right track. I knew my system was a crude, barely put together one thatโ€™s going to need complete reshuffling over very short periods of time. It never had the potential for a seamless expansion. I got on Fiverr and paid a guy to design my appsheet system so that I could focus more on construction management rather than software design. But that guy is everything behind what I am today, and I owe it completely to him. I saw the database and the table schema over our zoom and I understood what the appropriate design should be. Then I took it upon myself and here I am today, with a fully functional ERP for our construction business and have recently started to build apps for other people.

Hi @edward_samuel

A couple of resources that will help:

Data design for successful app creation

Educational resources

Hope these help!

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