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Visualize data instantly with machine learning in Google Sheets

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Re: Visualize data instantly with machine learning in Google Sheets

#11

Post by TuringTest »

taylorwc wrote: post #2

Oh, wow. I love where this is headed. Spreadsheets are one of the most abused products in a normal business--used for everything , and then some poor excel jockey ends up being forced to create a semblance of order from the chaos.

That's because spreadsheets are an excellent tool for prototyping, and developers have shitty tools for building robust products from a prototype.

If developers had a quick way to create properly engineered applications from a working workflow involving a spreadsheet, it would be easy to define most company processes on Excel or Google Docs and turn them into solid software.

But building an application that is functionally equal to the spreadsheet, just with robust engineering practices, typically involves several-months-long projects with many developers and managers, which is expensive.

Re: Visualize data instantly with machine learning in Google Sheets

#12

Post by arethuza »

TuringTest wrote: post #11
taylorwc wrote: post #2

Oh, wow. I love where this is headed. Spreadsheets are one of the most abused products in a normal business--used for everything , and then some poor excel jockey ends up being forced to create a semblance of order from the chaos.

That's because spreadsheets are an excellent tool for prototyping, and developers have shitty tools for building robust products from a prototype. If developers had a quick way to create properly engineered applications from a working workflow involving a spreadsheet, it would be easy to define most company processes on Excel or Google Docs and turn them into solid software. But building an application that is functi…

I once reverse engineered a spreadsheet that had cost the best part of a million pounds to develop - I made the relevant manager very unhappy by pointing out that significant chunks of the beast did absolutely nothing.

I did come to really like the "Trace Dependents" and "Trace Precedents" features in Excel! :-)

Re: Visualize data instantly with machine learning in Google Sheets

#13

Post by tyingq »

TuringTest wrote: post #11
taylorwc wrote: post #2

Oh, wow. I love where this is headed. Spreadsheets are one of the most abused products in a normal business--used for everything , and then some poor excel jockey ends up being forced to create a semblance of order from the chaos.

That's because spreadsheets are an excellent tool for prototyping, and developers have shitty tools for building robust products from a prototype. If developers had a quick way to create properly engineered applications from a working workflow involving a spreadsheet, it would be easy to define most company processes on Excel or Google Docs and turn them into solid software. But building an application that is functi…

Quickbase is the usual suspect for workflow via a spreadsheet, with functionality that's broader than say Airtable.

Google's "app maker" looks like their attempt to do something similar. https://developers.google.com/appmaker/ Though they seem to have left out the 'start from a spreadsheet' part.

Re: Visualize data instantly with machine learning in Google Sheets

#16

Post by TuringTest »

arethuza wrote: post #12
TuringTest wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's because spreadsheets are an excellent tool for prototyping, and developers have shitty tools for building robust products from a prototype. If developers had a quick way to create properly engineered applications from a working workflow involving a spreadsheet, it would be easy to define most company processes on Excel or Google Docs and turn them into solid software. But building an application that is functi…

I once reverse engineered a spreadsheet that had cost the best part of a million pounds to develop - I made the relevant manager very unhappy by pointing out that significant chunks of the beast did absolutely nothing. I did come to really like the "Trace Dependents" and "Trace Precedents" features in Excel! :-)

Yeah... the worst part of spreadsheet is that it's hard to document their structure and purpose. You may try to explain it with cell comments and blocks of color, but there's no easy way to signal the entry point or see an overview of how the different parts work together.

At least they are functional reactive, so it's easy to trace the evaluation of expressions.

Re: Visualize data instantly with machine learning in Google Sheets

#17

Post by zitterbewegung »

fakename wrote: post #9
zitterbewegung wrote: post #3

I thought Explore in google sheets has had this feature for awhile? I remember it suggesting visualizations in sheets a few months ago.

I've been using it for a while, too. I'm guessing it's been available in Enterprise/g suite, but is now rolling out to all users.

From my experience the public versions of g suite run a more bleeding edge version and they introduce stabilized features into g suite.

Re: Visualize data instantly with machine learning in Google Sheets

#18

Post by sandGorgon »

does anyone know how this kind of stuff gets built ? I'm considering a spreadsheet-y internal admin dashboard for my startup. I was looking at https://github.com/JoshData/jot to be able to sync stuff on the client side to the server.

has anyone worked on something like this ? the big challenge is synchronization - between server and multiple clients - while being able to offload a lot of computations on to the client.

I wonder how is the security built ? if i maliciously change the formulas in my browser.. will the backend datastore still accept the data ?

Re: Visualize data instantly with machine learning in Google Sheets

#19

Post by fiatjaf »

sandGorgon wrote: post #18

does anyone know how this kind of stuff gets built ? I'm considering a spreadsheet-y internal admin dashboard for my startup. I was looking at https://github.com/JoshData/jot to be able to sync stuff on the client side to the server. has anyone worked on something like this ? the big challenge is synchronization - between server and multiple clients - while being able to offload a lot of computations on to the client…

The big challenge is implementing the spreadsheet UI.

Re: Visualize data instantly with machine learning in Google Sheets

#20

Post by oaktowner »

cube00 wrote: post #6
taylorwc wrote: post #2

Oh, wow. I love where this is headed. Spreadsheets are one of the most abused products in a normal business--used for everything , and then some poor excel jockey ends up being forced to create a semblance of order from the chaos.

Someone needs to create Spreadsheets Anonymous and share the crazy stuff people do in Excel, the best one I've seen is a full GUI wizard (back, next etc.) in VBA.

I once worked at a large company (70K employees) in which the check request software (that is, if you needed to pay a vendor with a written check) was written in VBA embedded in Excel, using Outlook (the client, not Exchange) as Workflow.

You opened the "spreadsheet", which hid Excel itself and showed a form. You filled it out, clicked Send and it used your local Outlook client to email a copy of itself to your boss, who then opened it and was presented with another form for approval, etc, up through finance and finally to the person who wrote the check.

It was amazingly ugly and fragile, and of course, there was no way for anyone to see the state of the system (because the 'state' was distributed among the entire workforce's Exchange inboxes!).

Want to know the status of your check request? No problem, simply call everyone who might have been in the approval chain and ask them to search their inboxes. Hope you find the most current person!

(updated to correct the name of the software)

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