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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

#21
post #8

Kind of goes in the direction of what Thoughtspot ( https://www.thoughtspot.com/ ) is doing ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D-y_EjFsDuk )

Looks like a good idea. But, where does it get its data from?

Does it perform NLP on company documents?

Re: Visualize data instantly with machine learning in Google Sheets

#22
post #21
post #8

Kind of goes in the direction of what Thoughtspot ( https://www.thoughtspot.com/ ) is doing ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D-y_EjFsDuk )

Looks like a good idea. But, where does it get its data from? Does it perform NLP on company documents?

Honestly I don't know, I do not work for Thoughtspot.

My assumption is that it works on metadata coming from a relational schema with a rule parser on top.

Honestly I don't see how it would work well enough if it was based on NLP of unstructured data.

Re: Visualize data instantly with machine learning in Google Sheets

#23
post #19

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.

There's a React component for that. React-datasheet or something like that.

Re: Visualize data instantly with machine learning in Google Sheets

#24
post #10

Well charts is a good addon but just wanted to understand how they are able to do this ... i mean Machine Learning part , for example if somebody asks "Show me sales of X product in last year" , from machine learning perspective how this gets interpreted in actual SQL query ..

Presumably some ad engineers got sick of producing arbitrary customer reports, took the corpus of all customer requests, and tied it to the sheets that generated those reports. And a ton of glue code to make it all work.

Re: Visualize data instantly with machine learning in Google Sheets

#25
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…

>But building an application that is functionally equal to the spreadsheet

can you explain this to me? i've never used spreadsheets extensively so i'm clearly ignorant but my impression was that the only thing you could really (i know you can bend the rules etc.) is data transformation. when you say application is what you mean? i.e an ETL app or do you mean more than that?

Re: Visualize data instantly with machine learning in Google Sheets

#27
post #25

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…

>But building an application that is functionally equal to the spreadsheet can you explain this to me? i've never used spreadsheets extensively so i'm clearly ignorant but my impression was that the only thing you could really (i know you can bend the rules etc.) is data transformation. when you say application is what you mean? i.e an ETL app or do you mean more than that?

Excel in business / finance is a great mish-mash of ETL, modelling (from simple statistics to pretty advanced optimization), graphics and dashboarding. With too little structure and documentation to be good for you. A big plus is that every step is (at least without VBA) user transparent. From Excel to application would mean specs by non-sexually writers and continuous exceptions on specs when thereto unknown use cases of pretty much the same spreadsheet are found. (Since you don't exist unless you run your own spreadsheet, users often branche from the sheets of others.)

Re: Visualize data instantly with machine learning in Google Sheets

#28
When I worked for SAP back in 2007 (I was a fresh grad at the time), I was working in the business intelligence (reporting, analytics, and data warehousing) group and noticed how cumbersome it was for organizations to simply create and view reports (we're talking millions of dollars). I once said to my boss "you realize that in the future we'll simply just write 'show me a line graph for sales in the northeast'".

And so here we are now.

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