About

Made by one person, slowly, on purpose.

Sheetli is a small shop selling Google Sheets templates. The brief I set myself was simple and slightly unreasonable: spreadsheets that are actually fun to open, and that are engineered properly underneath.

Every product looks different, deliberately

There is no house style here, and that's a decision rather than an oversight. A debt tracker that behaves like an arcade cabinet shouldn't share a typeface with a stone-green ledger for sinking funds. Each template gets its own palette and its own type pairing, chosen for what it is. The only thing they all share is the engineering standard.

The engineering standard

Each spreadsheet is generated by a program, not clicked together by hand. That sounds like a detail; it's the whole thing. It means every one can be rebuilt from scratch, and every change is a change to source code rather than a cell somebody remembers editing.

Then each one is checked by a second program that recomputes every expected number independently from the same sample data — and compares the sheet cell by cell. The spreadsheet never gets to mark its own homework. Edge cases are tested as mutated copies: the empty state a buyer opens on day one, a divide-by-zero, an extreme value at each end, February, a deadline that has already passed.

It is a slow way to build and it has caught a real bug in every single product. One of them only appeared in five months out of twelve — a month-name lookup that had been silently overwritten, so June through December worked by coincidence and January through May were wrong. Nobody would have found that by looking.

Rules I build to

• Nothing to install, nothing to approve. Formulas do the work. A few templates carry one tiny built-in script for a reset button; it never asks for a permission, and START HERE says how to do the same thing by hand.
• Built for the phone too. Every template works in the Google Sheets mobile app — checkboxes tap, dropdowns pick, everything else is typing a number.
• Google Sheets, natively. The newest templates are built inside Google Sheets itself, so real checkboxes, sparklines and charts are on the table. There is no Excel version, on purpose.
• Sample data ships loaded. You see the thing working before you clear it out and make it yours.
• Limitations get written down. Every template has a START HERE tab that says what it does not do.

What's next

More are on the way, and the order moves based on what people ask for. If there is something you want, say so — that is genuinely how the next one gets picked.

— Vivian · hello@sheetli.com