Checklists

Your data was a checklist the whole time.

Live checklists from any sheet.

About Checklists

Pick any sheet with a title field and a completion field. Obvious infers the mapping. Click Create. The rows become checklist items — each with a checkbox, a strikethrough when it's done, and a progress bar at the top tracking how many are finished. Check something off in the checklist and the value updates in the sheet instantly. Nothing lives in two places. Nothing gets out of sync.

Drag items to reorder by priority — the sheet's row order stays untouched. Add new items from the input at the bottom and watch them write back to the sheet immediately. Collapse completed items so only what's left is visible. When the last item is checked, the list knows: "All done!" Not a status column to filter. Not a count to calculate. A view built for getting through the list.

A spreadsheet is the right tool for storing a list. It's not built for working through one. Checklists gives you the interaction model of a checklist with the data model of a sheet — at the same time, with no duplication. The list you've been managing in a sheet for months becomes a checklist in one step. Every view, automation, or report built on that sheet keeps working. The surface changed. Nothing else did.

Videos

How-to

Templates

Start with a template that uses this feature

Product Managers

Launch Cleared: Go/No-Go Checklist

T-3 days. Sixteen items. Engineering, Marketing, Legal, and Support all have something to close before the call. This template gives you a live checklist connected to a launch tracking sheet — 16 items pre-loaded across four functions, four already marked complete. In the go/no-go meeting, each team lead checks off their items in real time. The progress bar tracks what's left. When the last item clears, the list knows. No status email, no filter rebuild, no slide to update.

Created by Obvious

Individual Contributors

Personal Task List, Actually Actionable

You built the task sheet months ago. It has 22 rows across three projects and a done field you keep forgetting to update. This template connects that sheet — or one just like it — to a checklist view. Open it each morning, drag the three most important items to the top, and work through the list. Completed items collapse as you go. By end of day, what's left is exactly what's left. No filter to rebuild, no dropdown to click into, no mental tally required.

Created by Obvious

QA Engineers

Green Means Go: QA Release Checklist

The build just hit staging. Eighteen test scenarios stand between you and the release candidate. This template gives you a pre-loaded test plan sheet — 18 scenarios across Authentication, Core Features, Edge Cases, Performance, and Accessibility — with 12 already marked Pass, 2 Fail, 1 Blocked, and 3 not yet tested. Work through them in the checklist, check off passes, leave failures open. When the last P0 turns green, the progress bar tells you what you need to know.

Created by Obvious

Ops Teams & CSMs

Client Onboarding: Reset & Reuse

A new client signed yesterday. The 15-step onboarding sequence is the same as last time, and the time before that. This template gives you a permanent onboarding process — 15 steps across Admin, Setup, Kickoff, Training, and Handoff — that resets between cycles instead of getting rebuilt. Run the task to log the new client and clear the previous cycle's statuses. Open the checklist, work through it step by step. The Onboarding Log records every cycle automatically. The process compounds. The rebuilding stops.

Created by Obvious