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Google Spreadsheets and Python

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Re: Google Spreadsheets and Python

#81

Post by rattray »

j_s wrote: post #56
wffurr wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why are the row limits so tight?! 1200 rows for the free tier, and only 5000 rows for the first paid tier! That's crazy low, given that Google Sheets gives you 200,000 cells, or 10,000 20-column rows, for free. EDIT: That was from 2009. The current limit is 2,000,000 cells per sheet: https://support.google.com/drive/answer/37603?hl=en

Probably because they are in business to make money? Customers whose first priority is cost usually aren't good customers.

Right, but even their more expensive paid plan has a 50k row limit, which is low enough to preclude whole classes of applications.

They do claim a "custom number" of rows in their "contact us for pricing" plan, but the 50k number suggests that anything higher than that would have serious perf downsides with their current architecture.

Re: Google Spreadsheets and Python

#82

Post by josephjrobison »

Lightbody wrote: post #50

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 st…

For all the non-programmers out there that are comfortable with spreadsheets, this site - http://codingisforlosers.com/ -is pretty epic for building out a ton of dashboards and data pipelines with Google Sheets.

Re: Google Spreadsheets and Python

#83

Post by cyberpanther »

The big downside I've found using this a lot in the past is that Google has no SLA for sheets. Sure its Google, so it has high availability but things can quite often fail with no support from Google. So just be careful of building anything mission critical with this. The API can be wonky every once in a while. At one point it even took them like 6 months to fix an issue I had with the Apps Script API. If my business relied on that functionality, I would have been screwed.

The Jupyter Notebook use case sounds great but if you move to something that is more critical use a real data store.

Re: Google Spreadsheets and Python

#84

Post by jdormit »

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…

I would love to take a look at the source code for this!

Re: Google Spreadsheets and Python

#86

Post by phillc73 »

howsta wrote: post #52
simonw wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 reques…

Cofounder of Airtable here, I hear you and that's on the roadmap :).

Could you spend a couple of minutes to describe the advantages of Airtable over Fieldbook or Ragic? I've been gripped by indecision regarding which tool to use, and hence use none of them.

Re: Google Spreadsheets and Python

#87

Post by dragonwriter »

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…

> 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.

Isn't the tool that does what MS Access used to do, and that is available now, called "MS Access"?

Re: Google Spreadsheets and Python

#88

Post by eob »

Cloudstitch founder here (YC S15).

We wrap Google Sheets and Excel 365 in an API you can use to GET/PUT data along with a number of other goodies:

   - security policies (e.g., row-based auth)
   - file upload support
   - email triggers upon upload
   - a notion of "frozen" releases versus live dev data
     (released but yet undocumented -- email hello@ for details)
Very happy to provide support for anyone looking to use us as an API into their sheets.

Re: Google Spreadsheets and Python

#89

Post by cm2187 »

Lightbody wrote: post #50

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 st…

...when I think that Microsoft is trying to kill scripting in office...

Re: Google Spreadsheets and Python

#90

Post by dzhiurgis »

snuxoll wrote: post #27
buildbuildbuild wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 y…

Salesforce sells a lot of "best practices" that sometimes aren't, but so many young developers(and even architects) buy into.

You are leaving out storage costs. There's a minimum record size and then per licence billing, something like $250/GB/month.

If anyone needs some info/consulting - PM me via email in profile.

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