Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Google Docs gets an API for task automation

techcrunch.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

181–190 of 199 posts

Re: Google Docs gets an API for task automation

#181

Post by williamdclt »

nuclx wrote: post #162
legitster wrote: post #21

They 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…

Serious question: What exactly is the advantage of Microsoft Flow compared to a scripted solution (using python or - to stay within the Microsoft ecosystem - PowerShell)? What particular use-cases can it solve? E.g. is it easy to template Word/Excel document generation with it? Is it just that you don't have to write any code to use Flow?

> Is it just that you don't have to write any code to use Flow?

"just"? that seems like a massive selling point to me. If the people that are supposed to use the tool in a company are not technical (or not technical enough) it doesn't matter how good the tool is, the first check is "does it need programming skills"

Re: Google Docs gets an API for task automation

#182

Post by bluesroo »

stupidcar wrote: post #146
jeffFrom18F wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Google Inbox? I'm a paying user of corporate Gmail/GSuite and this is a pending disaster for me. They keep asserting that the "new improved" Gmail offers all the needed functionality but it simply does not.

Can you be more specific about what's missing that will be a disaster?

Things that are missing:

1. A group of pinned emails in one place. I can star things, and they end up in "Primary". But if I then go to the "Promotions" or "Updates" folder and select all -> archive the starred items get picked up too.

2. Same complaint as above, but for "Important" emails. Except "Important" emails aren't moved into "Primary", they are ALL left in their regular boxes.

3. Does not have an endless scroll of emails. I need to click back and forth between pages to see them all. Select all only selects my current page of emails.

4. If I choose priority inbox I lose the ability to select all documents in a given inbox. The above are fixed with priority inbox, but then I can't select all. I switch back and forth once a week because I'm honestly not sure which features are more painful to live without.

If I could have a separate box for important/ starred and display ALL of my unarchived emails on the screen I'd be happy. Inbox taught me to make heavy use of archive and keeping an empty inbox except for what's essential... And then they provided no tools for continuing to use it this way.

Re: Google Docs gets an API for task automation

#183

Post by skybrian »

afandian wrote: post #171
skybrian wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A business running GSuite getting banned would indeed be a disaster, but has this ever happened? For personal accounts, what happens if you create another account? It's also a big disruption, but "your voice can no longer be heard" seems exaggerated?

In a recent HN thread [0] someone's account was literally guilty by association with no recourse. That process is a black box. Maybe they could blacklist an IP range. Who knows. Let's say we're note-gathering at a conference about metadata formats for international science collaboration. Often we get remote participants who want to join the conversation, and selection bias says that they especially come from developi…

The part I question is treating blocked/not blocked as a binary thing. There are often workarounds. Some are easier than others. Some people are more capable than others.

On the one hand we have people who need lots of hand-holding to use computers at all, and on the other hand there are very capable hackers for whom getting one account blocked by Google is a minor speed bump. Most of us fall somewhere in the middle in terms of resourcefulness.

There are many other barriers to getting online, including cost, connectivity, language, and cultural barriers. We're clearly not in a state of equal access. I doubt remaining in Google's good graces is all that big a contribution?

Re: Google Docs gets an API for task automation

#184

Post by afandian »

skybrian wrote: post #183
afandian wrote: post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In a recent HN thread [0] someone's account was literally guilty by association with no recourse. That process is a black box. Maybe they could blacklist an IP range. Who knows. Let's say we're note-gathering at a conference about metadata formats for international science collaboration. Often we get remote participants who want to join the conversation, and selection bias says that they especially come from developi…

The part I question is treating blocked/not blocked as a binary thing. There are often workarounds. Some are easier than others. Some people are more capable than others. On the one hand we have people who need lots of hand-holding to use computers at all, and on the other hand there are very capable hackers for whom getting one account blocked by Google is a minor speed bump. Most of us fall somewhere in the middle…

Yeah, at this point pragmatism meets principle. All of the above is true, but given a choice, why choose a platform where you even might have to 'work round it'?

Etherpad might look more scary, but it's designed specifically to promote inclusion and liberating data.

The thing that I find inspirational about the Wikimedia example is that they embody principles of inclusivity in their tech choices.

Re: Google Docs gets an API for task automation

#185

Post by mav3rick »

virtualized wrote: post #160
mav3rick wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Lack of care ? I don't think you understand what it takes to keep Search and Maps and YouTube working seamlessly. Many big systems that companies use were invented at Google. Sure you can find UI bugs or issues butt conveniently ignore that Gmail changed the game with it's 1GB accounts in the era of MBs. Or the uptime of critical services. You have no idea how important design and code reviews are inside.

You just said "They are huge, but they are actually not very good" in a lot more words.

No I didn't running at that scale can't happen if you didn't design things thoughtfully.

Re: Google Docs gets an API for task automation

#186

Post by jac_no_k »

kevin_thibedeau wrote: post #178
jac_no_k wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

/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…

> Ideally the IT department would take a step back, assess what the users (you the stakeholder) needs are, and provide the solutions. This approach was taken with Lotus Notes. The ivory tower decided who could create and control a database. All it does is throw up bureaucratic barriers people will work around. How much of your company is dependent on bespoke Excel databases? What better tools can you empower the empl…

@cosmie provides a good model for IT organization to quickly bring supportable solutions. The principles behind Agile is to reach across these barriers / towers. These Experts are the product owners / users, the developers, and also includes UX designers, operations team, security team, and capacity team. This is ideal but realistically challenging to pull off.

A given Firm should also be providing a way for Shadow IT project to brought into the light, formally adopted and supported.

Re: Google Docs gets an API for task automation

#187

Post by cco »

jessaustin wrote: post #116
cco wrote: post #58

They could have chosen any amount for a salary in the example and they chose $25,000?

There's no reason to make people feel bad.

That is a salary below the minimum wage in many major American cities and only 200% of the federal poverty line. I'm not suggesting six figures, but maybe 40,000? It just seems odd to me to use a figure that low in a example.

Re: Google Docs gets an API for task automation

#188

Post by vxNsr »

petepete wrote: post #141
vxNsr wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The comp I work for has half bought into the O365 thing. Most of us are on the semi-annual channel for desktop clients, a lucky few are on monthly no rhyme or reason. And bec HQ is in EU they've decided to localize all web stuff to german. this makes entering dates or modifying formulas in excel online near impossible. Also for some reason they've chosen to keep flow and teams off by default, I can activate the free…

Impossible? You mean efficient.

Nothing efficient about needing to learn german to rework a formula.

Re: Google Docs gets an API for task automation

#189

Post by vxNsr »

ascar wrote: post #143
vxNsr wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The comp I work for has half bought into the O365 thing. Most of us are on the semi-annual channel for desktop clients, a lucky few are on monthly no rhyme or reason. And bec HQ is in EU they've decided to localize all web stuff to german. this makes entering dates or modifying formulas in excel online near impossible. Also for some reason they've chosen to keep flow and teams off by default, I can activate the free…

> this makes entering dates or modifying formulas in excel online near impossible. It would be so much easier, if the us finally stopped using this middle-endian date format. It's logically flawed and too prone for misinterpretation. Further the US is the only country in the world to insist on using it. yyyy-mm-dd or dd-mm-yyyy are both fine (I actually prefer the first, though my country uses the latter) and logical…

the dates issue is actually a little more confusing than you'd think because when entering the date online you need to enter it as dd/mm/yyyy but it will display as mm.dd.yyyy (did you catch that, they change the separator too).

Re: formulas, they are all in german which means that unless I know the german equivalent word that microsoft chose, I can't make any modifications or even really write new formulas.

Re: Google Docs gets an API for task automation

#190

Post by Cogito »

quietbritishjim wrote: post #145
Cogito wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The assumption that 'a byte is eight bits' is less specific than 'a character is one byte is eight bits' but I think captures it pretty well and affects at least all the people who are affected by RTL writing, I would think. If anything, the one character -> eight bits problem was so large huge amounts of work has been put into developing and using libraries that abstract the representation of text away from byte str…

"one byte is eight bits" is extraordinarily different from "one character is eight bits". In fact, by conflating them you are implicitly making the assumption that one character is one byte, which is exactly what your comment is really warning against.

I agree with you, but was trying to illustrate an example from the class of 'one byte is eight bits' style assumptions.

Hopefully I made it clear that 'one character -> one byte -> eight bits' is an assumption that can cause a lot of pain. The simplest usage of non-standard character bytes I can think of from the top of my head is in SMS (as described in that interesting article that was submitted these last few weeks sometime) where the standard used 7-bit character bytes in order to get longer messages, and then struggled to deal with international character encodings.

Maybe it's drawing a long bow, but I think this specific example is of the same class of assumptions that jacquesm was describing when they said "a byte is 8 bits", and clearly this is a problem that will not "only cause trouble in rare cases".

Post reply on HN