Using Google Sheets as a message log
Why use Sentry.io when you can just use a spreadsheet?
Sheet.log is a lighter combination of console.log() and Sentry.io, and logs any messages to Google Sheets — this is excellent for tiny experiments and side projects, especially those that reside across services and frameworks like Vercel / Cloudflare Workers / Sveltekit etc. — and you just want all the messaging in one place.
Because this sends data directly to Google Sheets, we can get the data from the server, and graph the data immediately! Things you can track:
- track site visits
- track serverless errors over time
- stupid simple Signup form for comments, feedback, emails, etc.
- answer questions like “how many times did someone click the Login button…”
This uses the excellent SpreadAPI code which uses Google Apps Script to add an API layer to any Google Sheet, and requires some setup on the Google Sheets side to work, but is 100% free to get going.
But wait, there’s more…!
There’s a slew of features that haven’t made it into this release, like CRUD, filter/sort, find, upsert… and an OpenAI GPT called “Sheet Show” that can manipulate and answer questions about the sheet. I’ve thought about combining Sheet Show with sheet.log but goes against the simplicity / atomicity of this project, which is very useful as a standalone, so I might clean it up and release it as a separate, beefier cousin of this project.
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