Use Spreadsheet data in your Framer Projects

Update: Also check out our Sketch Plugin!

Today Cloudstitch is releasing the first of a few bridges that connect design tools with data from your office suite. We’re starting with Framer, which is an amazing app for programmatic UI experimentation. The Cloudstitch Framer Module lets you load data from Google Spreadsheets and Microsoft Excel directly into your Framer projects.

We think designers should work with realistic data as often as possible. It informs your design decisions, lets you find edge cases that need to be accommodated, and makes for much better demos.

But keeping your data in JSON files is no fun: they’re a pain to edit and can’t be easily shared. Cloudstitch lets you load the data from shared spreadsheets in the cloud instead.

How to Install

Download the module from GitHub and add the cloudstitch.coffee file to the /modules folder of your project. You can find it in the /modules folder of the example project in the GitHub repository.

This git repository is also a working Framer project that serves as an example. Download it and double click cloudstitch.framer file to see.

How to Use

1. Create a spreadsheet using Cloudstitch

Create a new spreadsheet & API using Cloudstitch

Clone the Framer Module Demo on Cloudstitch and then edit the spreadsheet created for your new project.

This spreadsheet acts as the datasource that you can load from Framer.

2. Sync your spreadsheet with Cloudstitch

Syncing your spreadsheet data publishes it to the Cloudstitch API

When you’re done editing the spreadsheet, press the green Sync with your Template button in Cloudstitch. This makes a fresh copy of your spreadsheet available over Cloudstitch’s API.

3. Use the spreadsheet data in Framer

Include the Cloudstitch module within your project by adding the following:

Then get data from your spreadsheet by providing the Cloudstitch username and appname of your project:

In that code snippet, callback is a function that will get called and passed the variable data, which contains all the tables from your spreadsheet.

You can find the username and appname for your Cloudstitch project by looking at its URL:

Finding the username and appname for your project.

That’s all, folks!

When you’re done, you can build designs that rely on real, easy to update data instead of fake values stored in code files.

The project included with the module

Download the library, along with working demo code, at github.com/cloudstitch/framer.module.cloudstitch