Using Glide to Make Tiller Into A Mobile App

I read @ianhyzy’s post about how you can use Glide to make editing transactions in your Tiller sheets on mobile really nice and easy:

Ian provided some general information here, but I thought I’d share my experience.

Overall, working with Gilde was great. Within 15 minutes, I had my own Tiller Mobile friendly app. But there are some things you should know.

I was able to quickly create a free account at Glide here. With a free account, you can have unlimited apps, but there is some Glide branding. For $19 a month, there is no Glide branding, there are more component options and some other features.

It was helpful to watch the 90 second video on the home page. I also looked around the Introduction to Glide page.

When I felt ready to create my own app, I selected the + New app box. It presented me with a list of my Google Sheets. I then selected my main Tiller spreadsheet.

The first thing you should do is set the Privacy setting. Click the Settings link on the left then the Privacy tab on the right. Privacy options include Public, Public with email, Password and Email whitelist. I chose Password. There’s more info in the documentation here about what each one does.

My next step was to look at the Tabs settings, clicking on Tabs on the left. Glide works best on sheets when Row 1 contains Column Headers and the rest of the rows have column data. So, the Transactions sheet and the Categories sheet worked well. But other sheets, like Insights, Monthly Budget and many others don’t work.

You can decide which sheets to display in the Tabs sections. If you put a sheet under Tabs on the right side, it will show up at the bottom of the screen. Other sheets can be put under the Menu section. They show up under the hamburger icon on the upper left corner in the app. Other sheets can be Hidden. You can drag and drop each sheet into the section and order you want.

Once I decided on my Tabs, I got to work on the Layout section. You can choose from 8 different Layout styles. The Calendar option worked great for Transactions. You can also add Features like a search bar or sorting order under the Features tab. The Add tab lets you add data, such as new Transactions.

If you click on a single transaction, you can see options to adjust the Layout and decide whether to allow users to edit or delete data.

I wanted to add the ability to categorize my transactions. When I first looked at the Edit Layout, it let me edit the text in the Category field, but it didn’t give me a dropdown list of all the category choices.

I was able to add this feature by selecting the blue plus sign in the upper right of the Components section on the Edit item page and adding a Choice component. That let me select the Categories sheet as the Option sheet and Category as the Options column. Since the Categories sheet Category column lists all my categories, all those categories became available in the dropdown list in the edit mode.

Once I got the app designed the way I wanted, I went to the Share app link on the left. Using my iPhone’s camera, I aimed it at the QR code on the screen. This opened a link in Safari and let me add the App to my iPhone Home Screen.

There is no SAVE app button. Glide seems to automatically save the settings and any setup you create for the app. If you make changes, you need to download a new version of the app and delete the old one.

As new data comes into your Tiller sheets, that data will automatically be fed into your new Glide Tiller mobile app.

Give it a spin. It turns Tiller into a very useful mobile app. Let us know how it works for you.

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Hey Jon,

I really enjoyed Ian’s post as well. And thanks for sharing your experience with Glide apps too. Nice summary of how to get going with Glide and Tiller.

I tried it out earlier this year and was really impressed. I’m keen to create a Glide + Tiller app for my business finances at some point, and I’ll share any thoughts here.

Cheers,
Ben

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Very cool - especially how you use a row for receipt images!

Thanks for the info about the drop down menu. I wanted that but didn’t know how to implement, so now your instructions helped me do it.

Question: Does glide automatically update? I made this yesterday and today went to the app and the transactions were not updated. I then went on glide website and there was a ! to reload the sheet. Does this have to happen each time to refresh, or was this just a fluke?

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Hi @wipersnaz,
Glad that info helped regarding the drop down menu.

It’s been my experience that Glide does update automatically when new rows are added to Transactions or Balance History by Tiller’s feed.

If you add columns and sheets to your spreadsheet, that causes the reload request in Glide. You shouldn’t have to reload just when transactions feed it, so I think it was a fluke.

If you make any changes to your app settings, you need to re-add the app and delete the old one.

I don’t work for Glide so I’m not 100% sure how it works. I’m just sharing my experiences with it.

I checked out Glide app when it was mentioned on this forum, and agree it’s really slick!

One thing to note, however, is that they just announced a pricing change in the last couple days. There is now a 500 row limit on free apps, and above 500 rows must upgrade to the $19/month plan. They count any rows accessed by the apps on any tab in your worksheet. You can find the announcement and Q&A in the online community at https://community.glideapps.com/t/announcing-changes-to-free-and-pro-apps/1485/5

(I think there are some ways you could keep it under 500 rows, such as only accessing transaction for the last week or month, or something like that.)

Apps created before last Tuesday are grandfathered in to the free account, so for me, I think I am safe. Wanted to let others know. As I said, it seems like a great app, and I appreciate the tip from this forum-- I am using it to create a conference app for my nonprofit.

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Things seem to be going well for me using the app. The only thing I noticed is that now in the transactions tab on my spreadsheet, there is no longer a drop down menu in the category column for transactions I categorized via the app. I haven’t noticed any errors but wonder if that’s going to be a problem eventually. Does anyone else have that issue? How can I add the drop down menu back in the category cell?

Hi @wipersnaz,
I’m seeing that behavior too. The dropdown selector / data validation gets wiped out in the cell when a Category is entered by the mobile app.

It only does it for the cell that has mobile entered data. And since that row has now been categorized, I don’t think it will create a problem. If you select that row and insert one on top of it, the new row won’t have the data validation either. So you will need to avoid that.

To add the dropdowns back, you can select the column, select Data, Data Validation, then for the Cell Range Transactions!E2:E use the Criteria: List from a range: Categories!A2:A109. If you categories in the Category sheet are in a different column that A, you would use that column.

But doing this after every time you add a category would be pretty annoying.

I don’t have any connection to Glide, but I will report this as an issue. Maybe that can fix it.

I just tested this on mine and I’m seeing this now too - this didn’t happen before. I’m looking into this.

Thanks for the tip on adding the drown down back in. That worked to make the spreadsheet look pretty again. :slight_smile:

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