71–80 of 112 posts
You would message the bot something like "sessions for this month", and it would send back a graph.
wonder if you could make a similar bot with google sheets if they provide an api
https://statsbot.co/slack https://medium.com/slack-developer-blog/bots-you-can-count-o...
They are solving a problem that doesn't really exist, the challenge is not the last step of a data report, it's the steps involved in the beginning, getting good data in, formatting, joining multiple sources, automation, dealing with junk data, procedures,etc. I don't understand the example, what's the difference between typing "Show me a line graph" and clicking a button in excel that does the same thing.
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…
NLP interfaces in reporting work for simple things, when you want to start doing more advanced things they become incredibly verbose and inconsistent.
That's where a well designed UI really shines...and will continue to do so.
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 miss using machinations in MS Access back in the day. Now with Google Sheets, I am left wonting for a tool that enforces primary keys and is /easy/ to set up a view or query.
They are solving a problem that doesn't really exist, the challenge is not the last step of a data report, it's the steps involved in the beginning, getting good data in, formatting, joining multiple sources, automation, dealing with junk data, procedures,etc. I don't understand the example, what's the difference between typing "Show me a line graph" and clicking a button in excel that does the same thing.
I found it immediately useful. They've solved some UX and discovery issues around creating charts. And it's not _just_ charts... they're answering questions and identifying trends within the data. e.g. I threw some pretty basic data at this and it told me “Flights” contains a yearly cycle: “Flights” increases until May 1, decreases until October 1, and increases until December 1.
That's pretty handy. YMMV, but this is awesome.
Can we talk about getting data into Google Sheets? Is there a standard way to build a pipe from, say, a reporting database to dump aggregates into Google Sheets? I built a private Add-on for my company that surfaces specific aggregates as Sheets functions (i.e. getSalesByDay(...)) and I have found so many bugs with that whole ecosystem. Deploys are completely manual and require copy-paste, you can't reliably tell wha…
For our non-technical employees I write an endpoint that gives them a CSV with the most current info (often with a super simple front-end that they can use to query for specific date ranges or with filters). They download this CSV and upload it into their sheet manually to update the underlying data when they need new info.
It would be so great if you could just say "here's a URL; keep my data fresh from this source" and it would automatically do it.
Can we talk about getting data into Google Sheets? Is there a standard way to build a pipe from, say, a reporting database to dump aggregates into Google Sheets? I built a private Add-on for my company that surfaces specific aggregates as Sheets functions (i.e. getSalesByDay(...)) and I have found so many bugs with that whole ecosystem. Deploys are completely manual and require copy-paste, you can't reliably tell wha…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I never had a problem with the Sheets V4 API that came out last May, how big of a database are you talking here?
The add on doesn't talk to the reporting database directly, Google's Apps Script JDBC service doesn't support Postgres/Redshift. The add on gets data from a REST API. I then have an etl job that precalculates the aggregates and stashes them in Redis that the API then reads from.
Can we talk about getting data into Google Sheets? Is there a standard way to build a pipe from, say, a reporting database to dump aggregates into Google Sheets? I built a private Add-on for my company that surfaces specific aggregates as Sheets functions (i.e. getSalesByDay(...)) and I have found so many bugs with that whole ecosystem. Deploys are completely manual and require copy-paste, you can't reliably tell wha…
Yes, so much this. I've encountered this same issue. For our non-technical employees I write an endpoint that gives them a CSV with the most current info (often with a super simple front-end that they can use to query for specific date ranges or with filters). They download this CSV and upload it into their sheet manually to update the underlying data when they need new info. It would be so great if you could just sa…