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Forget CSV - Export to Google Sheets

TL;DR does this exist already? Something that makes implementing data export to Google Sheets super easy, e.g. create-a-google-sheet.com/cellA1,cellB1,cellC1. Would it be useful?

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I started building a SaaS platform a couple of months ago where one of the core features is a payment form. One of the first things I implemented was a CSV export of the form entries because I thought it could provide a lot of flexibility to the customer in order to avoid a lot of feature requests ("I want to filter, sort, extend, transform, etc. etc. my orders, can you build it?").
I assumed most users would be able to solve their use case with that.

Now I often hear people having trouble with the CSV - apparently non-tech people can't work with them very well. Example problems:

  • Their Excel can't handle CSV well because it uses different characters than the default ones, which is the case in a lot of European countries (after 30+ years Excel still can't handle CSVs properly? WTF)
    • It uses semicolons instead of commas to separate columns so they have to manually split columns
    • It uses commas instead of points for decimals so the numbers are interpreted as text, making it harder to sort, sum, filter...
  • When they make changes and save the file again as CSV, some of the information is lost (like background colors etc) because it isn't XLSX

These problems sound obvious to tech people, but apparently they're not as straight-forward as you'd think.

So I started thinking it might actually be easier to have a button "export to Google Sheets" which would open a Google Sheet in a new tab with the data, maybe even pre formatted with filters, first frozen row and stuff like that. Then they wouldn't need Excel on their computers and all the character stuff wouldn't be a problem anymore either.

But how would you implement this? I'm sure you can build something using the Sheets API where the user has to connect his account and you create a new sheet in his account, but this seems overkill to implement for a simple export feature, especially in an MVP.

So what if there was a service that would create a Google Sheet by URL?
E.g.
servicedomain/cellA1,cellB1,cellC1|cellA2,cellB2,cellC2|cellA3,cellB3,cellC3

or

servicedomain/?source=publicLinkToACsvFile.csv

Does something like this exist already? Or is there a similar service that makes exporting to Google Sheets very easy to implement? It seems like a perfect tool to use when developing MVPs.

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