Where for art thou Chrome extension idea?

(in search of a problem to solve)

It began November 10th…

I’ve wanted to make a chrome app for a while. A friend I worked with a couple of years ago had made a chrome app that was a work around to allow non-developers to easily view a github branch. While we gave anyone who wanted it the ability to set up a sandbox and instructions on how to pull down a branch, it was an intimidating thing for people outside engineering to do. As a result, it was rarely done. Non developers instead relied on show and tells or paired programing to look at work in progress.

The extension was a gamechanger. It removed barriers to view work in progress for designers and product folks and allowed for asynchronous review.

Ever since then I’ve wanted to make an extension just to understand the process. (I learn best when I make something as opposed to reading theoretically how to do something.) The problem is I need a problem that would be solved by the extension. Staring with a tool and then coming up with an intriguing problem is - challenging. I’m starting this blog post to inspire me and when I come up with an idea I’ll update and post!

and now…

I got it! Smartsheet dashboards are great and have saved me a lot of time by using them to replace power point for updates. However, there are some key look and feel features that are missing. I had a work around but it was a bit clunky.

One day I as I was removing the work around after a presentation I thought about the time I was costing myself. I just needed something that would fill in the Smartsheet gap that doesn’t let you set the font size for row reports independantly of the sheet you are pulling data from.

I knew that extensions could be used to overwrite CSS, and viola! I had my mission.

In the video below I walk through my solution. The Chrome Extension is now available here!

I talk about the first chrome extension I created as a work around for better control the look of content in Smartsheet dashboards.