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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

#101

Post by kyleschiller »

shostack wrote: post #94
ozataman wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Yep. Wake me when an AI can tell me "hey, that monthly trending conversion report you asked me to pull...yeah, you're missing two days worth of data when tracking broke, so it will just make your numbers look lower when rolled-up monthly and be hard to notice." BTW, that is also the reason I not only set alerts, but review data at a daily level when pulling any rolled-up reports of significance.

Why can't AI tell you you're missing data?

Re: Visualize data instantly with machine learning in Google Sheets

#102

Post by gsvclass »

aeorgnoieang wrote: post #69
gsvclass wrote: post #55

There's a lot of basic stuff like column titles, moving columns about, filtering, search that I found had a quite a learning curve with sheets. I built and use this instead. Bell+Cat https://bellpluscat.com

I love your "Made with and ️ on the 3rd rock from the sun." tag.

Thanks, its a little sad how I survive on taco's and coffee :)

Re: Visualize data instantly with machine learning in Google Sheets

#103

Post by cat199 »

tempfs wrote: post #48
MitjaBezensek wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So many of our clients (I'm still working in the BI space) are still using Excel workbooks and sending them to each other over email. I think it will take quite some time before we see any major improvements in this area. But I agree with you. Some of the stuff I see makes me cringe.

Excel is the appropriate tool for one-off adhoc analysis. When something needs to be regularly produced, then and only then should it be moved to a formal BI solution. People have a lot of questions and Excel is an approachable tool for small analysis that users can self-serve with.

OMG you are so like 5 days ago..

everybody knows the correct answer is jupyter notebooks, and totes everyone like uses them, that's what it said on my facebook the other day.

Re: Visualize data instantly with machine learning in Google Sheets

#104

Post by neovive »

harshaw wrote: post #49

I played around with this the other day. I have a spreadsheet with a bunch of columns. It wasn't immediately obvious how to use the explore feature intuitively. It graphed data but not really the ones I wanted. I was also hampered by it using only about 200 pixels on the right side of the screen. I started typing in a question but it couldn't guess what I was interested in. YMMV. Perhaps with a fairly simple spreadsh…

"people use spreadsheets for just about everything"

That is so true. I used to do consulting for small businesses and was amazed at how non-programmers used Excel to solve so many problems outside of finance and accounting. The CRM/HR solutions were very common and interesting (e.g. Lead/prospect management, sales, timesheets, vacation schedules, etc.).

Re: Visualize data instantly with machine learning in Google Sheets

#105

Post by shitgoose »

reitanqild wrote: post #70
hacker_9 wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

At that point it would be tempting to bypass the screen, the eyes and the brain as well ;-)

brain was bypassed long time ago...

Re: Visualize data instantly with machine learning in Google Sheets

#106

Post by simo7 »

peatmoss wrote: post #86
simo7 wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I doubt it. 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.

And I'd argue that a well-designed UI only goes so far, and that eventually you need the expressiveness of some sort of programming language. This suggests a hierarchy of user interfaces for complex tasks: structured language > purpose-specific UI > natural language (processing) Old adventure games were really illuminating with respect to limitations of natural language interfaces. Rather than allowing for the expres…

"Show me country & city as rows, year as a column, sum the amount of population for country/city combination, show the YoY as a column and the subtotal for city".

Really? That's 3 clicks a way with a well-designed UI.

And what if I have those 3 fields in different tables? Even more verbosity...

P.S: My job has nothing to do with designing UIs, just to dispell any doubt :)

Re: Visualize data instantly with machine learning in Google Sheets

#107

Post by wyck »

Nagyman wrote: post #76
wyck wrote: post #37

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.

Did you try it? Yes, getting good data is a challenge but that's not one they can solve in Sheets. Making a graph is also not always one button, unless you have very simple data. 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…

To be honest no, I don't use sheets unless it's for something quick and dirty, it just doesn't compare to excel. In terms of machine learning I have tried IBM Watson with sets of data, interesting concept but I found myself still juggling the data to get what I wanted. I currently use Tableau.

Re: Visualize data instantly with machine learning in Google Sheets

#108

Post by massaman_yams »

kyleschiller wrote: post #101
shostack wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yep. Wake me when an AI can tell me "hey, that monthly trending conversion report you asked me to pull...yeah, you're missing two days worth of data when tracking broke, so it will just make your numbers look lower when rolled-up monthly and be hard to notice." BTW, that is also the reason I not only set alerts, but review data at a daily level when pulling any rolled-up reports of significance.

Why can't AI tell you you're missing data?

For most use cases, you don't even need AI. Once you reach a certain scale, there are certainly ML-based solutions available: https://medium.com/netflix-techblog/rad-outlier-detection-on...

Re: Visualize data instantly with machine learning in Google Sheets

#109

Post by cepetersen »

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.

I'm at a 250 EE company with very small ops budget and I built a stable and modular account planning and CRM system (when we had 150 EEs) that uses structured + validated + protected Google Sheets for user inputs and some viz, Alteryx as the ETL, and Tableau (Reader) as the visualization. Took half a junior person and half a senior person to maintain it for 100 clients and 200 users. It has served well as a prototype for our Salesforce installation this year, which has enabled us to decommission half of the modules in the Google Sheets system. If we had gone straight from nothing to Salesforce it would have induced shock in most of our employees, and our data and processes would not have been ready to just drop into Salesforce. In my mind, that is the best use case for a spreadsheet 'app' ... build it from the start with the goal of it being a transitional tool to a 3rd party app, nudging users along the way to professional processes.

Re: Visualize data instantly with machine learning in Google Sheets

#110

Post by Roverlord »

elefanten wrote: post #50
reitanqild wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I think that depends... open floorplans already have plenty of ambient noise usually. Chatter, people on phones and web calls. If the voice input picked up in a small range and people got in the habit of kinda semi-whispering their occasional commands... I doubt it'd be a massive difference. But I'm assuming lots of things, I can also envision your scenario playing out to great annoyance.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subvocal_recognition

You don't necessarily need to make noise to speak to computers.

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