Why every project needs a grid and why it has nothing to do with personal taste

And upfront:

• Do I think grids are great? — Absolutely!
• Is it a matter of personal taste? — Sure!
• Are there alternatives to the grid? — No way! (Okay, okay: Maybe.)
• Do I shoehorn a grid into every project no matter what? — Obviously! (… I don’t.)

But (and this is the part I mean completely seriously): A grid increases my trust in a software solution. And trust is not a “soft” category in business software — it’s a factor of unconditional relevance.

• No trust, no commitment.
• No commitment, no performance.
• No performance, and the potential of your business application goes to waste.

But what does business software need to deliver at its core? It needs to map my processes and accelerate work. Or even more distilled: it needs to do the right things right. No distractions. No ambiguity. Straight-forward. That calls for dedicated workflows and reports. For interfaces that let me focus entirely on my use case. And for 95% of cases, this happy path works beautifully. But business wouldn’t be business if everything ran according to a fixed template. Business software also has to handle the remaining 5%. That doesn’t mean every edge case needs to be fully modeled, but the software can’t be a roadblocker either. The chosen framework must cover the standard case while being flexible enough to handle exceptions adequately. In short: input should be possible for 100% of cases, even if the last five percent aren’t ideal entries. What matters more is that all questions raised by non-ideal inputs can be answered easily. More important than the perfect fit, in my view, is traceability. Because only when I can trace every case and my business is plausibly represented does tool acceptance actually work. Doubt, on the other hand, torpedoes successful software adoption — shadow systems and hand-stitched backup solutions start to flourish.

And of course, doubt is part of daily life. A number doesn’t add up. A report looks off. A customer asks a question. A team member says: “That’s not right.” That’s the moment when business software shows its true character. Is it transparent enough to support troubleshooting? Does it provide the tooling needed for a deep dive? Or do I still need my “shadow Excel” to verify these cases? And that shadow Excel isn’t bad intent — it’s a symptom. It appears when people feel: “I can’t see what’s happening in the system. I can’t check it. I can’t validate it. I don’t know if it’s actually correct.”

And that’s exactly where I love the grid! It displays (virtually) all information — as close to the actual data layer as possible. It hides nothing; it spreads everything out neatly so that tracing a problem is as easy as it can be. Of course I need to know where to start the search — but I can be confident that the answer is right in front of me.

Instead of multiple specialized tools that each need explanation, overlap in some areas and leave gaps in others, the grid gives me a single generic tool. My core idea: better to lay out all the data and expose the answer than to run dedicated special reports that may or may not contain what I’m looking for.

So what exactly do I mean by “grid” — and where do I see it play to its strengths?

When I say “grid,” I don’t mean just any tabular view. I mean something roughly like what MS Excel offers with its pivot functionality, only not as clunky and sluggish. And that’s already its first ace: a grid in my software project gives me a powerful analytical tool, so I can solve a wide range of problems using the available functions without needing an Excel export.

• Grids are primarily suited for large data volumes — both large row counts (tens of thousands) and dozens of columns.
• They provide trivial-but-essential functionality like filters and sorting.
• Beyond that, they allow me to group data across multiple levels and display subtotals (sums, averages, etc.), making a top-down entry into complex data worlds effortlessly simple.
• Views can be individualized and saved for reuse — meaning: editing columns (showing/hiding, reordering, pinning) and setting default filters.
• Grid charts visualize the current view graphically and, thanks to drill-down functionality, allow interactivity with the data even within charts.
• Grids are generic — instead of predefined standard reports, exceptions and edge cases can be represented just as easily.
• Last but not least, the Excel export provides an interface to save data snapshots or to run very specific analyses in MS Excel after all.

Classic use cases are plausibility checks like:

• “Show me all items without a weight.”
• “Group by category and count.”
• “Sort by price descending, but only for supplier X.”
• “What are the outliers?”

Why we at esveo have been pushing grids for over 10 years

The grid has been with us from the very beginning. I still remember Andi and Conrad — esveo’s first developers — sitting in the SLUB library over 10 years ago, tinkering with an early version.

Since then, “our grid” has grown across a wide variety of projects — not because we think tables are particularly pretty, but because we’ve seen time and again what happens when this diagnostic tool is missing. And also: because we’ve seen the look on our clients’ faces when they find data quality errors in no time that they’d suspected for years but could never trace, let alone quantify. And in that recent pitch: there was a need to display a preview and print view of all of a user’s data, grouped by a specific criterion and sorted chronologically. The standard esveo grid component isn’t a one-size-fits-all hammer applied to every project — it’s simply the most efficient way to pragmatically deliver the required functionality.

The grid helps:

• when something doesn’t add up,
• when I need to explain something,
• when I need to take responsibility,
• when I want to validate numbers,
• when I want to keep shadow Excels small.

In short: the grid isn’t a technical gimmick that just makes design and development fun — it has proven its value across our projects time and again. Can I deliver successful projects without a grid? — Sure! Will a grid alone make a project successful? — Certainly not! But as soon as larger data volumes are involved, the ability to interact with that data productively is so much greater than without one, that skipping the grid is essentially skipping effectiveness.