Hi
I have an excel file where I keep my collection of experimental music CDs. I want to share that with the outside world but I feel that the excel file is not that great to navigate. I would like the user to be able to search on several fields like title, artists, tags, …
What stack exists for that and ideally it would import the excel file so I don’t have to copy everything manually
Grid Iron 3 from Chillidog is perfect for this.
A very simple use of Grid iron on one of my sites here. See how quick the search is.
Thank you. There is one possible problem: I have genre as well but some fit two or even more genres. Is it possible to have multiple genres in one column or how should I best organise this? Let’s say I have classical, metal, jazz, country. If I sort the genre column, I will have classical, country, jazz, metal.
Now if some entries are both country and jazz, or jazz and metal.
I am string to think a filesystem like you have at a library might be better suited.
I would like to suggest my Datably stack:
Video here:
I’d like to second Datably!
I would think that the Datably database option would be a lot more flexible and should be able to handle recursive fields like Genres a lot more smoothly then a spreadsheet would.
I third (or fourth) the recommendation of Datably — it‘s a fantastic piece of work!
I think Datably will probably be it then. I think my main concern is that I want to have multiple terms in one cell. So if you search for music entries, it will also list and but it would not list or .
I also have links to relevant websites in other columns. Some entries have only 1 link, others have 2, … I think they would be best in one field/cell.
Another question: is it possible to have some kind of search page above the database where you can search on fields, or is it only the searchbox at the top right that serves that function?
In terms of having multiple data in one field, I would suggest to separate these out into individual fields- That’s just the best approach if using a database (it’s called “normalization” → Database normalization - Wikipedia).
Regarding the search: it’s just the search field above the table, however it is searching across all fields. If you - as the developer - want to put in certain default filters, this is also possible in a very powerful and finely grained way.
I’ll add a shameless drop in here to 
I just released the first Beta of my Airtable Publisher stack, a stack suite specially build for presenting Airtable data (the stacks are in production in a couple projects for some time now)
Airtable is a online service for storing and handling data, looks like a spread sheet in first place, but is way more powerful (it supports everything databases do, e.g. relations between tables).
It’s free for projects with up to 1200 records and max. 2GB of attachment data (pictures etc).
Airtable supports, for example, multiselect fields, especially for categories, colors and such. Airtable supports importing Excel files.
My Airtable Publisher stacks allows to query the tables and interact with the data, have a look at my demo shop:
The demo shows different views for the records (tiled view vs. row view), multiple images / attachments per record, filtering by category, sorting, free form searching and filtering by designer.
For your example, in the row view of the list or detail view for a product you can click on the settings or colours to filter all products with that color or setting (each product has multiple colors and settings)
You can read more about the stack and download it with a simplified demo here:
For your genre question, sorting will be alphabetical and therefore rely on the order of genres. You can break them into different pages, different columns or only rely on search to find them.
Hope that helps
Cheers
Greg
Very nice stack and easy to implement due to outstanding documentation!
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