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Google Spreadsheets and Python

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Re: Google Spreadsheets and Python

#21

Post by domfletcher »

rickcnagy wrote: post #6

Having run an (internal) app that is deeply integrated with Google Sheets for about a year, I think that Sheets is good and bad. It's _extremely_ powerful for allowing business users to easily get access to and manipulate data manually. Downside is that it really struggles past a few thousand rows when you've got more than 20 or so columns. Definitely good for a quick and dirty way to expose data to internal users, b…

I had a lot of mileage avoiding row count actually in the sheet buy using an API to retrieve data directly when a user is interested in a particular record. Then the only think you need to keep in the sheet is an index which is lighter because (as far as I can tell) it's cell count that really affects performance.

Re: Google Spreadsheets and Python

#23

Post by audleman »

rickcnagy wrote: post #6

Having run an (internal) app that is deeply integrated with Google Sheets for about a year, I think that Sheets is good and bad. It's _extremely_ powerful for allowing business users to easily get access to and manipulate data manually. Downside is that it really struggles past a few thousand rows when you've got more than 20 or so columns. Definitely good for a quick and dirty way to expose data to internal users, b…

I had the same experience. I had to write a layer to slice my data up and submit no more than 50 rows, and retry on connection timeouts. Very frustrating, and so weird that a global giant like Google releases an API that's so mediocre.

Re: Google Spreadsheets and Python

#24

Post by paulfitz »

btown wrote: post #17

https://gspread.readthedocs.io/en/latest/ is great, but it's limited in what kinds of things it can set (formatting, notes, etc.). One other option is to create an endpoint on script.google.com which can access a much richer SpreadsheetApp API: https://developers.google.com/apps-script/reference/spreadsh... . You can POST to it using an auth token from the same service account oauth creds (though you need to add driv…

Sign me up for your product or service, would definitely be interested in seeing code for this.

Re: Google Spreadsheets and Python

#26

Post by imcoconut »

gregorymichael wrote: post #12
mixmastamyk wrote: post #10

Interesting to choose this over simpler storage, such as sqlite. I suppose you get offsite backups for free.

(author here) Main advantage in our usecase is getting the CUD interface for free.

This is a big advantage. Especially for smaller personal projects. I'm tracking various things I eat and do each day (exercise, art, read, etc.) as well as how I'm feeling (energy levels, sleep quality, etc.) in google spreadsheet. Sheets is great because I can edit from any device anywhere I am.

I like looking at simple things like time series' of what I'm doing, eating, and how I'm feeling and then exploring correlations, and regression betas/t-stats. Stuff that's just a little bit to onerous to do exclusively in sheets. At the moment, I have to download the spreadsheet then open with pandas in a jupyter notebook and then run everything. I'm definitely going to use the python api from now on - thanks a lot for writing this!

Next step is a simple python-based web dashboard to view all the results - but keep sheets for CUD instead of having to build a custom one and use sql/sqlite.

This really is super helpful - thanks again!

Re: Google Spreadsheets and Python

#27

Post by snuxoll »

buildbuildbuild wrote: post #5
f_allwein wrote: post #2

I think there's a bit of a gap in the software ecosystem today in that there's no tool that lets semi-technical people like myself create simple applications, e.g. to read and write to databases. Bit like MS Access used to do. Google Spreadsheets actually goes a long way (I've done some stuff using the IF function etc. in it), but obviously has its limits. So combining it with Python sounds interesting. Not sure if i…

Salesforce often ends up filling this gap in organizations that can afford it, but often results in a technical debt of layman-designed schemas persisting long into production. (cleaning up or directly working with SF data is an expensive nightmare in my experience even post-Heroku acquisition) You are correct that a modern MS Access alternative would certainly find its market.

For simple needs Salesforce isn't even that expensive, we have around ~38 "App Cloud" licenses - that adds up to $950/mo to not deal with data scattered everywhere, not needing to waste my time designing a full CRUD app with security, managing a database server, etc.

It helps to have an experienced Salesforce admin though, I love the "citizen developer" that Salesforce always preaches but you can run into a mess if you don't think your data model through like any other database.

> cleaning up or directly working with SF data is an expensive nightmare in my experience even post-Heroku acquisition

Plenty of decent sync products to make this not stink. We happily pay for DBAmp every year to keep all our data on-site so we can expose it to other users and to keep a backup of pruned data.

Re: Google Spreadsheets and Python

#28

Post by vijayr »

simonw wrote: post #4
f_allwein wrote: post #2

I think there's a bit of a gap in the software ecosystem today in that there's no tool that lets semi-technical people like myself create simple applications, e.g. to read and write to databases. Bit like MS Access used to do. Google Spreadsheets actually goes a long way (I've done some stuff using the IF function etc. in it), but obviously has its limits. So combining it with Python sounds interesting. Not sure if i…

Have you seen AirTable? It's definitely the best modern alternative to Access I've seen - easy to create tables, great web UI and a phenomenal iOS mobile app. https://www.airtable.com

Is there a downloadable version of this, paid or free?

Re: Google Spreadsheets and Python

#29

Post by schwarrrtz »

gregorymichael wrote: post #12
mixmastamyk wrote: post #10

Interesting to choose this over simpler storage, such as sqlite. I suppose you get offsite backups for free.

(author here) Main advantage in our usecase is getting the CUD interface for free.

This is one of the reasons why I liked working with Parse; the data browser was very handy. This seems like a great alternative.

Re: Google Spreadsheets and Python

#30

Post by arthurdenture »

btown wrote: post #17

https://gspread.readthedocs.io/en/latest/ is great, but it's limited in what kinds of things it can set (formatting, notes, etc.). One other option is to create an endpoint on script.google.com which can access a much richer SpreadsheetApp API: https://developers.google.com/apps-script/reference/spreadsh... . You can POST to it using an auth token from the same service account oauth creds (though you need to add driv…

One thing to note is that the new version (v4) of the Sheets API can access the same fancy functionality that Apps Script can. So if gspread moves to that (which e.g. https://github.com/burnash/gspread/issues/435 alludes to), some of those limitations will go away.

(And the sync thing is neat!)

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