sheetdriven

Sheetdriven is a term used in software engineering and automation to describe systems whose behavior is primarily defined by spreadsheets. In a sheetdriven approach, spreadsheets serve as the source of truth for configuration, rules, and metadata, which are then read by an application or workflow engine to determine actions, validations, and outputs. The term is not widely standardized and appears mainly in discussions of lightweight, user-facing configuration.

In practice, a sheetdriven system might expose a workbook in Google Sheets or Excel where separate sheets or named ranges contain parameters, thresholds, and decision tables. A controller reads the data at startup or on changes and translates the sheet contents into programmatic logic, often through data-driven patterns, rule engines, or templating. Sheetdriven configurations are valued for their accessibility, allowing non-developers to modify behavior without code changes, and for rapid iteration during prototyping.

Common domains include business process automation, test case management, data pipelines, and form or report generation, where business rules are frequently updated. Benefits include lower barrier to modification, versioning via the sheet history, and easier auditing of decisions. Drawbacks involve scalability limits, potential data integrity risks, lack of strong typing, and separation challenges between data and code. Security concerns may arise if sensitive data resides in shared sheets.

Some practitioners combine sheetdriven designs with traditional code, using the spreadsheet as an externalized parameter store or as a UI layer that populates forms and rules.