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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

#51

Post by dragonwriter »

ice109 wrote: post #25
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…

>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 can pretty much do anything you'd want in an application, though not in a particularly maintainable way. GUIs? Yes. Data updates triggered by GUI actions or cell entry changes? Yes. Interacting with external resources? Yes, that too. It can do a lot more than data transformation (except in the sense that all computation can be modelled as data transformation between inputs and outputs, in which case, yes, that's all Excel can do but all any other app does, too.)

The more that's been done in Excel, the more pain it will be to maintain it in Excel or port it to a non-Excel platform, because Excel is seductive for write-once, but horrible for maintenance, and the people in an org who have it as their main tool are unlikely to be either cognizant of the problem or devoted to spending effort mitigating it.

Re: Visualize data instantly with machine learning in Google Sheets

#52

Post by fudged71 »

andrea_s wrote: 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 )

As far as I care, Google Sheets has beaten several BI companies towards "Natural Language Querying" by being free and accessible to everyone.

Re: Visualize data instantly with machine learning in Google Sheets

#53

Post by lightbyte »

spinlock wrote: post #46
uberneo wrote: 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 ..

I wonder if it's actually machine learning or if they just implemented a query language that tries to guess what you mean. The definition of machine learning that I use is: an algorithm which improves its performance through experience. So, if charts doesn't get better the more you use it, it's not machine learning.

If I had to guess I'd say the machine learning part is analyzing a sentence ("Show me a line graph for x, y, and z") and determining what exactly they want to see.

Re: Visualize data instantly with machine learning in Google Sheets

#54

Post by hacker_9 »

mbesto wrote: post #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…

Watching the gif on that page, it actually seems slower to use. Instead of just drag selecting the table, I have to write out all the header text now by hand.

Re: Visualize data instantly with machine learning in Google Sheets

#56

Post by hacker_9 »

reitanqild wrote: post #44
Nydhal wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> we'll simply just write 'show me a line graph' How about we just 'say' it ? At one hackathon, I had the idea of making an Alexa skill that would translate simple voice commands like 'graph column A' into matplotlib functions and then show the graphs. Teammates weren't too excited about spreadsheets though.

Wouldn't that make "mechanical keyboards for everyone in the open floorplan" seem like a smart decision?

Just need to bypass the mouth and jack-in directly to the speech center in the brain.

Re: Visualize data instantly with machine learning in Google Sheets

#57

Post by ozataman »

tryitnow wrote: post #45
mbesto wrote: post #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…

I'm currently evaluating BI vendors for my company and just about every major contender has this functionality or is developing it. Read the Gartner report from 2017 and they basically just come out and say that this will be the new standard in BI. The much harder problem is data management and preparation. Anyone with half a brain and a decent visualization tool can create basic graphs - but that doesn't mean they s…

And data management / preparation is where major mistakes are made - get a join wrong and you may easily be missing data or double counting something just obscure enough to go unnoticed like "ancillary sales".

There is something potentially harmful, or perhaps that needs addressing, about end-user tools growing in expressive power. A good friend who does statistical genetics work once told me "but I don't want every user running their own regressions and drawing nonsensical conclusions from badly prepared data!"

Re: Visualize data instantly with machine learning in Google Sheets

#58

Post by inthewoods »

Cool stuff - someone else mentioned Thoughtspot - that was my initial thought as well. Very similar idea.

I wish that Google would take the same sort of "embed" idea further in G-Suite. I find it amazing that I can't (as far I know) reference slides from another deck in Google Slides. The use case would be putting together a series of "core" slides that are updated across your organization as they change. Given the web nature of G-Suite, this, to me, would seem like a no brainer.

Also, inserting charts from Google Sheets into Google Presentations looks pretty terrible. I often revert to Excel because the charting is fair superior imho (though just as challenging to wrangle).

Re: Visualize data instantly with machine learning in Google Sheets

#59

Post by Raphael »

uberneo wrote: 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 ..

Seems similar to what Wolfram Alpha does, but restricted to a smaller data set.

Re: Visualize data instantly with machine learning in Google Sheets

#60

Post by intrasight »

darwhy wrote: post #30

I'm wondering how Microsoft is responding to this. Do they expect their current Excel dominance to continue despite competitors constantly catching up to feature parity and even extra goodies, like this one?

Yes, Power BI has had this for a couple years in the form of "Q&A"

https://powerbi.microsoft.com/en-us/documentation/powerbi-se...

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