The spreadsheet view power organizers have been asking for (now in Experimental Features)

The spreadsheet view is one of the best UX patterns ever invented

You can scan a hundred rows in a second. Sort by any column. Filter to just the ones you care about. Export the whole thing into something else. It's why your accountant uses one, why your fantasy-football commish uses one, why every product manager who's ever drawn a roadmap has reached for a grid.

It's also exactly the wrong tool for being your wedding's source of truth, your group trip's RSVP system, or your weekly volleyball game's payment ledger — for all the reasons we've documented at length.

So here's a thing we've quietly been building: a read-only spreadsheet view that sits on top of Brunchie's real data. Source of truth stays where it belongs — in the hangout, real-time, mobile-first. But when you want to see your data flat, sort it, filter it, or export it, you can.

It lives behind a toggle in Settings → Experimental Features. Flip it on. No waitlist, no DM required.

What you actually get

Three tabs, all read-only:

RSVPs

Every guest who's RSVP'd to your hangout — name, email, response (yes / no / maybe / no-response), plus-ones, meal pick, custom-question answers — in one flat table. Sort by anything. Filter by response status. Type a name in the search box and the table narrows in real time.

The killer use case is wedding RSVP audit week. You're at the 75% mark, you need to know who hasn't responded yet, you don't want to scroll a card-based view 180 times. Open the spreadsheet view, filter to "no response," see the 18 people left, copy emails for the follow-up batch. Done in two minutes instead of forty.

Expenses

Every line item across the hangout — or, if the hangout is a recurring series, across every session in the series. Date, description, payer, total, your share, status (paid / outstanding).

Sort by date to see the chronological ledger. Sort by payer to see who's footed how much overall. Sort by status to see what's still outstanding. Filter to a single date range when you're reconciling a specific weekend. Export to CSV when your group treasurer wants to do their own analysis in Sheets.

For recurring sports groups this is the new way to see "court fees across the season" without clicking into each session.

Guest list (weddings + parties)

The full guest list flat — name, side, party (bride/groom/host/etc), table number, dietary, plus-one, RSVP status. Sort by table to see the room composition. Sort by side to see the bride-vs-groom balance. Filter to "dietary not blank" to see the catering count for special meals.

This isn't a new data source — it's the same guest list you've been managing in the hangout. Just laid flat for the moments when flat is faster.

What you don't get (intentionally)

No editing. You can't change RSVP statuses from the grid. You can't reassign tables. You can't edit expense amounts. Every action that mutates the hangout still happens in the hangout itself.

This is on purpose. The reason spreadsheets fail as source of truth is that any cell can be edited without context — a wrong click, a misplaced paste, a sort-without-selecting-all, and the data is corrupted. The spreadsheet view is for seeing your data, not for being it. Source of truth stays in the canonical hangout surface; the view is a window onto it.

If you want to make a change, tap the row — you're back in the hangout's normal UI for that record. Edit there, the view updates in real time.

No formulas. The grid doesn't accept SUM, IF, or anything else. Brunchie computes totals (total RSVPs, total expenses, balance per person) and shows them as summary rows; you don't write the formulas. If you want bespoke formulas, export to CSV and run them in Sheets — that's the right tool for ad-hoc analysis.

How to turn it on

1. Open Brunchie on web or mobile
2. Tap your avatar → Settings
3. Scroll to Experimental Features
4. Flip on Spreadsheet View
5. The view appears as a new tab inside every hangout you own

It's per-account — flip it on once and it's on for all your hangouts. Co-organizers don't see it unless they've also enabled it on their account. Guests never see it.

Default is off because not every organizer wants more UI; if you're running a friend-group dinner with eight people, you don't need a spreadsheet view to see who's coming. The toggle is opt-in for the organizers who do want the extra surface.

Why "Experimental Features" and not "shipped"

Three reasons:

1. The interaction patterns are still settling. Should sorting persist across sessions or reset? Should the filters be column-header dropdowns or a single search box? We have opinions but haven't burned them into a final shape yet — having early users on the toggle gives us specific feedback before we lock it in.
2. The export format will likely expand. Today: CSV. Soon: a "copy as Markdown table" option for the people who write reports, and a Sheets-direct connector if there's demand. We want to ship those as the same toggle's surface, not split the experience across versions.
3. Performance under very large hangouts. Brunchie's RSVP cap is conservative by default, but a few organizers run hangouts with 500+ RSVPs. The grid handles that today; we're load-testing the upper edge before promoting the feature out of Experimental.

If any of that changes your decision to flip it on, flip it off — the toggle is two-way, no commitment.

The bigger picture

Brunchie's bet has always been that the right interface depends on what you're doing. When you're inviting people, the right UI is the share-link card. When you're picking a date, the right UI is the poll. When you're showing the venue to your partner, the right UI is the mobile hangout view. When you're auditing 180 RSVPs the week before the wedding, the right UI is — actually — a spreadsheet.

We just don't want the spreadsheet to be the source of truth. The hangout is. The view is a lens.

If you're an organizer who's been quietly wishing for a grid view, Settings → Experimental Features → Spreadsheet View is where it lives. Flip it on, kick the tires, send the founder a note about what's missing — that feedback genuinely shapes what ships next.

Personal notes from the founder

The first version of this was a Sunday-afternoon hack because I was trying to figure out which of my badminton group's recurring sessions still had outstanding Interac payments and I didn't want to click into eight separate hangouts. The flat view was a power-user concession to my own laziness. Two weeks later, three other organizers asked for the same thing for their wedding RSVP audits. So we cleaned it up, put it behind a toggle, and shipped it.

Brunchie has always tried to keep the default surface friendly — most hosts don't want power-user complexity. But once you've got 100+ records, the power-user view earns its keep. The Experimental Features toggle is how we let those two audiences coexist without one stepping on the other.

What's next

• The full recurring-group walkthrough: Run a recurring sports group on Brunchie — covers RSVP, capacity, expense splitting where Spreadsheet View earns its keep
• Why spreadsheets fail as source of truth: Why Spreadsheets Fail for Wedding Planning — the inverse case, when a spreadsheet is the wrong tool
• Group polls that work: Group Polls That Actually Get Answers — another power-user surface for the decide phase

Stop being the group-chat janitor. Open Brunchie, flip the toggle, scan your data like an adult.