About
Made by one person, slowly, on purpose.
Sheetli is a small shop selling Google Sheets and Excel 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 Python 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
- No add-ons, no scripts, no permission grants. If a template needed you to install something, it would be a worse template.
- No checkboxes. Google Sheets checkboxes can't survive the .xlsx conversion, so every template is played by typing a mark or a number — which is also why they all work on the mobile app.
- Both formats, always. Google Sheets and Excel, in every purchase. Never one or the other.
- 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
82 more are planned and the whole list is public — including priority and the month each one needs to be listed by. The order moves based on what people ask for, so if you want one sooner, say so.
— Vivian · vivian@vivifye.com