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Google Spreadsheets and Python

twilio.com

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Re: Google Spreadsheets and Python

#41

Post by DontGiveTwoFlux »

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…

One issue I ran into quite a bit was timeouts.

I had a spreadsheet with a few hundred rows I was using to create Docs and send emails. I was running from scripts.google.com. Any operation running for longer than about five minutes would time out so I had to batch my work into smaller buckets and hit run a bunch of times.

Re: Google Spreadsheets and Python

#42

Post by udfalkso »

startupdiscuss wrote: post #11
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…

If anyone from Google is reading this: please add a database (yes, like a cloud version of MS ACCESS) in the Google Docs/Drive suite. Has anyone looked at "Fusion Tables?" A google search reveals that is what it is supposed to be.

Check out airtable.com for something like this. Great product, lots of use cases.

Re: Google Spreadsheets and Python

#43

Post by PhilipRawson »

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…

Perhaps Bubble is close to what you may be looking for: https://bubble.is

I know several people using this as a quick backend database solution since they make it so easy to interact with data and expose a GET and POST API.

Re: Google Spreadsheets and Python

#44

Post by ghostly_s »

skj wrote: post #16
bognition wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They already have one its called CloudSQL https://cloud.google.com/sql/

That's not part of the drive/docs suite.

Yep, this should be accessible to users. Someone needs to bridge that gap from spreadsheets to real apps. One click to convert your Spreadsheet into a database. Or hell, just silently migrate it when (NUMROWS + NUMCOLUMNS) > BIGNUMBER .

Re: Google Spreadsheets and Python

#45

Post by ghostly_s »

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…

Microsoft has a new suite of web-based tools called Sway, PowerApps, Flow and Dynamics365. I gather this are trying to meet this need...somewhere in there?

Re: Google Spreadsheets and Python

#47

Post by simonw »

vijayr wrote: post #28
simonw wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

No, it's entirely cloud based. You can install their iOS and Android apps but they'll only work if you have an internet connection.

Re: Google Spreadsheets and Python

#48

Post by simonw »

startupdiscuss wrote: post #9
simonw wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

It is the fastest growing productivity app of the year (I read somewhere based on a metric I cannot recall). I didn't realize they had an API. I just looked it up and the documentation is so good it makes me tear up. The trick with the documentation is that it lets you pick one of your own databases and it then makes all the examples relevant to that database! Why doesn't everyone do that?

I'm actually a bit disappointed by their API as it stands at the moment. Say for example you want to retrieve a record with a bunch of nested records in one go. Currently you have to do that by pulling the first record, then looping through the array of nested IDs for the other records and retrieving each of them in turn.

I want to be able to say "get me back record 56 and all of the linked records in a single request".

I ended up having to iterate over their "fetch all records of type X" endpoints and then gluing the data back together in-memory, which is a pretty nasty workaround.

Re: Google Spreadsheets and Python

#50

Post by Lightbody »

I love Google Sheets. It is so much more powerful than 99.9% of the users appreciate. Here is how I use it at my day job as head of PM at New Relic:

  - Fetch deals closed and lost hourly from Salesforce
  - Fetch for each of our 14k+ paid accounts usage metrics using our Insights product
  - Pull both items into a nice color-coded business dashboard that is near realtime
  - Send said dashboard out as a PDF to a bunch of stakeholders daily/weekly
  - Save PDF snapshot into Google Drive so I can easily pull up historical reports
If you haven't tried out Google App Script and supercharged your spreadsheets, give it a shot. It's also basically the only way the engineer in me gets to code much these days, so I have fun with it too :)

PS: Google Sheets is definitely much slower for pure spreadsheets than Excel, no question about that. But by using cloud-based JavaScript + custom code, I can often work around that issue by writing functions that process the data quickly and report on what I need. Ultimately I end up getting much more out of it than Excel.

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