Kanban Your Spreadsheet

There are a few interfaces that many of us naturally gravitate toward when organising work. We’ve talked about them before, and they keep coming back for a reason:

• Kanban, popularised more than ten years ago by tools like Trello.
• The Eisenhower Matrix, simple but powerful for prioritisation.

They are visual and intuitive, making it easier to reason about tasks than long tables ever could.

Over the Christmas period, I had a bit of time to think and tinker. One question kept coming up: why can’t I edit my product backlog spreadsheet using a Kanban board or a matrix view? Spreadsheets are incredibly flexible, but the interface is almost always strictly tabular. So instead of searching for an existing solution, I decided to turn the question into a small side project.

The result is Kanban Your Spreadsheet.

The ambition is straightforward: run seamlessly inside Google Sheets or Excel as an additional interface layered on top of the familiar table. The spreadsheet remains the source of truth; the Kanban or Matrix becomes just another way to interact with the same data.

The more ambitious vision goes further. Ideally, this interface shouldn’t be limited to spreadsheets. Any tabular data source could benefit from the same visual layer — whether that data lives in a database, Asana to-dos, Mindiply timelines, or Notion databases.

Today, what exists is a simple prototype called Kanban for Spreadsheet. The process is still somewhat laborious:

1. Import data
2. Modify it inside the tool
3. Export to Excel or CSV
4. Copy the records back into (a copy of) the original spreadsheet

It’s not seamless yet, but it works well enough for smaller datasets and early experimentation.

If this sounds useful, please give it a try. And if you’d like to see more features, native apps (iPad / Mac / Windows), or integrations with other systems, drop a line. If there’s genuine interest, we’ll happily continue building it.

For developers: the source code will be released as open source soon. The core is written in vanilla JavaScript, and the demo application is built with SolidJS.

This started as a holiday side project. With enough feedback, it could grow into a more general way of interacting with structured data — visually, not just in rows and columns.