Publish an app to the web
Some apps are for your team; some are for the world. Publishing gives an app a public, read-only web page — a product catalog your customers browse, an event agenda on attendees' phones, a price list you text to a client — without anyone needing an account. Readers see your records and dashboards in the app's own design; they can browse and search, but never change anything.
Publishing takes under a minute:
- Open the app and go to Settings. If you're an owner of the app, you'll find the Publish to the web card near the top.
- Flip the switch. Sheetward creates a private link and a QR code for it.
- Share the link however you like — copy it, use your phone's share sheet, or let people point their camera at the QR code.
The link is the key. It's deliberately long and unguessable, and the page asks search engines to stay away — so your audience is exactly the people you hand it to. If a link ends up somewhere it shouldn't, press New link: every shared copy stops working — within a minute at the outside — and you get a fresh one. Unpublish takes the page down just as fast; publishing again later creates a new link.
What readers see. The public page shows what a viewer in your workspace would see: records as a list or as image tiles (tiles first on phones), each record's details, and the app's dashboards. Sensitive fields stay masked, exactly as they do for viewers. Your app's icon and design style carry over, so the page looks like yours, not like ours.
Your look travels with the page. The public page shows the app the way you see it — dark or light mode, brand colour, text size, layout density, design style, and whether records open as a list or as tiles all follow your Display settings for this app. Change them any time; the public page follows within a minute. Two things deliberately stay behind: your interface language (the page speaks the app's own languages) and settings that are personal chrome rather than the app's look. If several owners share the app, the page follows whoever last touched the Publish card.
Built for phones. On a phone the page's navigation moves to a bottom tab bar — each form gets its own tab (with four or more forms, the first two plus a More menu), followed by the dashboard and Submit when the app has them — and records open as image-friendly tiles. Readers can still switch to the table view; on a desktop the tabs sit in the header instead.
Group records for browsing. A catalog reads better by category, an event agenda by day. In the Publish card, pick a Group records by field for any form and the public page shows its records under group headings — in list and tile view alike. Records with no value gather under their own heading, and a reader who sorts by another column flattens the groups until they sort back.
Choose exactly which fields are public. A catalog often has columns the public shouldn't browse — a cost price beside the selling price, a supplier name. Mark the fields you do want public with a public rule in the Rules sheet (one row per field, no value needed). The moment any field of a form is marked, the public page shows only the marked fields — everything else simply never leaves Sheetward's servers. One side effect: search is switched off on a narrowed form, so nobody can probe hidden values through it. Your team keeps seeing every field as usual.
Accept submissions. A published app can also take input — an RSVP, an inquiry, a request — without accounts. In the Publish card, choose a form under Public submissions, and the public page gains a Submit tab. Submissions are checked against the form's rules like any record and land in your records list with public@intake as their creator — so you always know which rows came from outside. Submitters see a thank-you note (and a reference number when the form numbers its records automatically) — never other people's submissions. Sheetward also limits how fast — and how many — submissions the public page accepts in a day, so a prankster can't flood your records.
Publishing is part of your plan — each plan includes a certain number of apps published at the same time. Beyond that, publishing never changes anything inside your workspace: roles, records and rules all work exactly as before. Think of the public page as a window, not a door — you decide when it opens, what it shows, and when it closes.