DEV Community

Innovate Nest Labs
Innovate Nest Labs

Posted on

Building Complex "Excel-Style" Dashboards in Flutter: Tables, Charts, and Exports

When you transition from building consumer-facing Flutter apps to enterprise software (ERPs, CRM, Financial Tools), you quickly run into a major roadblock: heavy data visualization.

Clients inevitably ask for "Excel-style" features. They want massive datasets, frozen left columns (sticky headers), nested sub-headers, editable cells, and a beautiful KPI dashboard sitting right on top of it.

If you've tried building this, you know the pain. You install one package for charts, another for exporting, and then spend a week writing custom ScrollControllers for your tables.

After spending weeks syncing controllers on a recent project, I realized the community needed a better way.

Enter nrb (Nexora Report Builder)

I built the nrb package to be an all-in-one layout engine for heavy data grids and dashboards.

Pub.dev: https://pub.dev/packages/nrb

Template Source Code: https://github.com/mehedisoftdev/nrb_example_template.git

Graph & Charts

Export Features

Nested Header Table

Solving the Layout Nightmare
Here is what nrb handles out of the box without needing extra dependencies:

True Sticky Columns: Keep your row identifiers locked on the left while the user scrolls horizontally through massive datasets. No lag.

Native Animated Charts: Enterprise dashboards need charts. nrb includes physics-animated native charts (Segmented Gauges, Multi-line, Histograms, Scatter plots) so you don't need to install massive graphing libraries.

Editable Grids & Exports: It supports TextFieldCells, turning a static report into an editable form that can be extracted to Excel, PDF, or Word with one method call using the premium API.

Get Started in 5 Minutes
I believe the best way to learn a package is to read a working project. I've published a completely free, open-source Enterprise Dashboard Template using nrb.

You can watch the video walkthrough of the code here: https://youtu.be/dppfUyO7vW8

Stop fighting with custom scroll controllers and bloated pubspec files. Grab the template from GitHub, and if it saves you a headache on your next project, consider leaving a like on pub.dev!
Official link: Innovate Nest Labs

Top comments (0)