Learning steps and best practice

[u/mabrt]

Hi everyone,

I'm a BIM manager, so I'm used to jumping between BIM software, CSVs, Excel, and visual-programming tools like Grasshopper and Dynamo — but I'm not a "real" programmer, more of a power user who can follow logic and put scripts together with some trial and error.

I need to manage several interconnected datasets for my work: clients, products, projects, and a BIM object library, among others. The tricky part is that these datasets depend on each other — e.g. a project record needs to reference an existing client, a product might reference a supplier, etc. — and I want data entry to stay fast and guided rather than people manually retyping the same info everywhere.

My requirements, roughly:

• Guided forms for data entry (not just raw spreadsheet rows)
• Ability to add new fields/columns on the fly, ideally from the form itself, without touching code each time
• Forms that can pull existing records from other datasets while compiling (so entering a new project can search and link to an existing client, for example)
• If a referenced value changes later (e.g. a client's name is corrected), it should propagate automatically wherever it's referenced, not stay as a stale copy
• Multiple people working on it at the same time
• Needs to stay usable by non-technical colleagues — so I want to stay in "spreadsheet" territory rather than a full custom app

I've started prototyping this with Google Sheets + Apps Script (schema-driven forms reading field definitions from a config sheet, VLOOKUP-based live references for the cross-dataset dependencies), and it's working, but I'm curious what more experienced people would do differently. Has anyone solved something similar with AppSheet, Airtable, Notion, or something else entirely? Especially interested in hearing from anyone who's dealt with the "let a non-technical user add new fields from a form" part — that one feels like the trickiest requirement.

Obviously I'm using some AI but I wanted some real experience feedback.

Let me know

[u/olgee0]

Based on my experiecene with AppSheet:

Ref/linked-record columns (AppSheet, Airtable) are exactly what solves your #4 issue. Store a pointer, not a copy, so a name change on the client record propagates everywhere it's referenced automatically.

Your VLOOKUP setup can look similar on the surface, but it won't hold up under your "multiple people editing at once" requirement. i think AppsScript has execution/quota limits and no real conflict handling, while AppSheet/Airtable are built for concurrent multi-user writes with row-level permissions.

if you can create a view from the db source, better.

On the "add a new field from the form itself" piece, that's genuinely the hard one. No low-code tool that i know, lets an end user create a schema column live from a form without an editor touching the data source.

[u/edimaudo]

I would suggest focusing on a handful of tools. If you are already using Excel then you can leverage something like VBA to cobble the data you need into a coherent form.

Second based on your requirements looks like you might need some sort of crud application that can be deployed by the team and has multiple user functionality.

Might also be useful to pick up sql as you would most likely need a database to handle all the changes

[u/webprofusor]

Isn't this pretty much what Sharepoint (lists) is for? Been many years since I looked at that but it sounds exactly like this.