Introduction

What is Zen?

Zen gives you all the missing tools you never knew you wanted in Google Sheets. Zen is a spreadsheet overlay that provides advanced computational directives to Google Sheets and Excel. Zen users can design spreadsheets as executable functions. Designers using Zen can create spreadsheets that accept data via input worksheets, execute logic as transient worksheets, and produce a final set of output worksheets as the spreadsheet's results.

Zen supports several computational directives. With Zen, designers can perform copies, joins, outer joins, cross joins, and cell drag-downs using PebbleScript, Pebble Stream's intuitive programming language. PebbleScript makes these complex data transformations accessible to expert and beginning spreadsheet users.

Designers using Zen's advanced computational directives can join worksheets by common criteria, stack worksheets on top of each other, and generate new worksheets from other worksheets. Zen enables the automation of data manipulation functions available as menu options in typical spreadsheet applications.

Automated execution of worksheets

The standout feature of Zen is that it allows Pebblers to automate mundane spreadsheet tasks with a single click. A Pebbler can create a series of worksheets that, when combined, function as a single process.

Connecting worksheets as a single process allows users to apply the same approach to datasets of different sizes without further manual adjustments!

How we've integrated Pebble Stream technology into Zen

Zen uses Pebble Stream's core spreadsheet emulation technology to inject these advanced data manipulation and computation directives into Excel, Google Sheets, and other spreadsheet applications.

Designers can use Zen to develop all or part of a spreadsheet workflow. A bonus of using Zen is that your Zen-designed spreadsheet workflow can be executed directly in the spreadsheet or published to Pebble Stream Flow as an executable process.

Zen can encapsulate the logic of a spreadsheet for later execution as a portable process. Developers can execute the logic encapsulated in a spreadsheet process by embedding it in a cloud, mobile, or desktop application.