sheetaware

Sheetaware is an open-source framework designed to treat spreadsheets as programmable data sources rather than static files. It provides libraries and runtime components that enable applications to read, write, and query data from spreadsheet backends such as Excel workbooks and Google Sheets, as well as from CSV and similar tabular formats. The project emphasizes schema-aware access, allowing typed data to flow through data pipelines and analytics tools. It can infer column types, validate data against user-defined schemas, and track changes over time.

Core components include connectors for each backend, a unified schema layer that normalizes types, and a synchronization engine that supports incremental updates and conflict resolution when multiple sources modify the same sheet. The architecture is designed to be pluggable, with adapters for new backends and pluggable storage backends for in-memory or on-disk persistence.

Key features include automatic schema inference, explicit schemas for validation, read and write operations with transactional guarantees where supported, change history, and access controls at the column or sheet level. It also supports offline mode and lightweight streaming of updates to downstream analytics systems.

Common use cases cover data cleaning and preparation, ETL pipelines that incorporate spreadsheet inputs, feeding dashboards, and automated testing of processes defined in spreadsheets. Sheetaware originated in a collaborative effort among data engineers in the early 2020s and is maintained by an open-source community under an permissive license.

See also: spreadsheet data, data integration, spreadsheet API.