Run your course catalog and LMS content from a Sheet

A catalog your instructors can edit

Building a lightweight LMS or course marketplace usually starts with the wrong step: standing up a database and an admin UI just to hold a list of courses. But a catalog is a spreadsheet — one row per course, columns for level, price, module count, and instructor. Your content team already knows how to edit that.

PasteSheet serves the sheet as typed JSON, so your catalog page fetches the rows and renders the cards. A related tab can hold modules or lessons keyed by course slug, giving you a simple two-level structure without a real backend. See the broader headless CMS pattern for how the pieces fit.

What you can drive from the sheet

Common columns and the queries they unlock:

• ?level=Beginner — filter the catalog by difficulty or audience.
• ?category=Data — group courses into tracks or subjects.
• ?sort=price or ?sort=-rating — order by price or popularity.
• A Lessons tab filtered by ?course=intro-to-sql for a course detail page.

Fetch the catalog as JSON

Point your catalog page at the endpoint and read the courses. Filter and sort with URL parameters — no query language to learn:

curl "https://pastesheet.com/your-endpoint/Courses?level=Beginner&sort=price"

{
  "data": [
    {
      "title": "Intro to SQL",
      "slug": "intro-to-sql",
      "level": "Beginner",
      "modules": 6,
      "price": 49,
      "instructor": "Dev Sharma"
    }
  ]
}

Read-only, so it is safe to publish

Because the endpoint is read-only by design, it is safe to expose publicly or hand to a teammate: consumers can read and query the data but can never change the sheet. And there is no Google Cloud project, OAuth screen, or service account to set up — you paste a share URL and get a live API.

What it costs

Frequently asked questions

Sources

• Files you can store in Google Drive (size limits) — Google

Related use cases