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Google Docs gets an API for task automation
121–130 of 199 posts
Re: Google Docs gets an API for task automation
#122They will have a lot of catchup to do to get where Office is now. I'm frankly amazed by how good Microsoft Flow has been. So many dumb business processes rely on an Excel doc somewhere, or a stupid manual email somewhere else. But with Flow I've seen just a single smarty-pants able to fully streamline an entire department one rule at a time. They don't need to get permission to bring in a new logo - it's part of Offi…
> They will have a lot of catchup to do to get where Office is now.
That's a sentence I never thought I would hear.
Re: Google Docs gets an API for task automation
#123Earlier quoted context omitted.
>they got bored with it I've always wondered why Google is so bad at keeping various services going. Your comment caused me to reflect that Google hires a lot of smart people. Smart people tend to get bored with working on the same thing and want to work on new shiny things. Could it be that the smart people at Google do a bang up job of creating new services, but then get bored and move on to something new, leaving…
Google's promotion process biases very heavily towards "impact". The problem is that maintaining existing projects generally isn't considered to be a demonstration of impact (or at least, it's a MUCH harder case to make). It's much easier to make the case that greenfield projects demonstrate impact. Additionally, engineers have a good amount of power over what they get to work on: managers generally have to convince…
Engineers lost a lot of their power from the Eric Schmidt days. It's the PMs that are fighting for controlling engineers now, and killing projects that the engineers are working on (thereby stopping engineers from getting the promotion they work for).
The promotion process is how you described though, PMs don't get promoted for maintaining projects, or even improvement on some metrics (that engineers are very good at), they always want new shiny stuff to brag about.
Re: Google Docs gets an API for task automation
#124thanks, but no thanks. I spent a month building integration with google hangouts, only to see it being deprecated before we could even launch. wasted months fighting with undocumented drive realtime API issues to make it work seamlessly and it was pulled last year without replacement. drive v3 api still does not have ETAG conditional uploads that drive v2 had. never biting that google bait and switch thing with apis…
This is the reason I will not recommend Google Cloud to any of my clients. I just can't rely on them
Re: Google Docs gets an API for task automation
#125Earlier quoted context omitted.
>I've always wondered why Google is so bad at keeping various services going I'm starting to believe that it might be simply because low quality software is hard to maintain. They have some very complex software, but nothing of great quality. They might hire a lot of smart people, but not very many that are actually good at developing quality software. It appears that being smart doesn't make you diligent in your wor…
Google's software is "free". If it was too good, it would kill competition. Google has one fear: to be cut in pieces because of monopolistic behaviour. Google, Gmail, Google map and google translate have almost killed concurrency. Google doc is improving.
i think you mean "the competition" instead of "concurrency".
but i see where you're coming from, it's "konkurencja" in Polish :)
Re: Google Docs gets an API for task automation
#126Which parts are completely new that you couldn't do before? Haven't they had APIs for years that let you pull data out of documents and edit them as well? Or Google Docs specifically was lacking here?
I believe its specifically Google Docs.
Google Sheets has had a reasonably good API for years.
Re: Google Docs gets an API for task automation
#127Earlier quoted context omitted.
the entire productivity suite is very much an MVP product. the killer feature is real-time collaborative work, for that aspect it's actually quite good IMHO. then for sheets, being able to work in "apps script" is fantastic. apparently you can use typescript in excel with some third party tools but surely they all stink in some way, and won't product portable documents. and anyway, VB is ok enough and has its own str…
Excel is adding JS support: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/office/dev/add-ins/excel/cu...
That seems better than google’s version given it seems like the function will act like just another built in.
Re: Google Docs gets an API for task automation
#128Earlier quoted context omitted.
Hahahaha. I stumbled upon Flow last year when I switched jobs. Our IT/procurement process is ridiculous, so I scrounged around our intranet resources for licenses and tools that I had access to by default or could get/request access to without triggering the Eye of Sauron to gaze down upon me from the tower of IT Security. My team does analytics consulting work for large multi-agency marketing campaigns, and I used F…
/me is one of the minions from team "Eye of Sauron". However I'm not stuck in this tower. I'm torn between two worlds. One side applauds the grass roots based solutions and the JFDI attitude. The other side is concerned that these solutions becomes widely used, de facto production, and problems upstream ends up breaking the output. On error, hopefully fails loudly but subtle problems could creep in. If the reports ar…
Until IT departments get infinite resources (that is, never) there will always be a need for these JFDI solutions. Some group will always go starved for attention and have to cobble together their own solutions. IT backlogs are always longer than the resources to do the work.
Re: Google Docs gets an API for task automation
#129Now if only I could automate my mail merge and build a CRM from a spreadsheet, scan business cards into it and hit a button.
Re: Google Docs gets an API for task automation
#130I wished they would spend time on fixing bugs, Google docs has so many subtle bugs it is a very annoying product to use. Of course you could argue that you could do both new features and fix bugs but with budgets (even for Google) finite and new features not as critical as fixing existing issues I would love for the priority to be given to bug fixes. Pet peeve: it is impossible to do a wysiwyg document in Google docs…
Another hugely annoying bug that I cannot get over is that it doesn't respect umlauts such as in German typed via US keyboard even when using the Apple way of doing it by holding the key and selecting. Maddening.