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Show HN: Using Google Sheets as the back end/APIs of your app

zerosheets.com

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Re: Show HN: Using Google Sheets as the back end/APIs of your app

#141

Post by dorgo »

afro88 wrote: post #122
ipince wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I read your comment and your blog post and I still don't understand what happens when I put a link to a sheet in the text box and click Go.. what happens? You say your inputs and outputs are all in the sheet.. ok.. what does the button do? Are you just calling some API and giving it the sheet as the input, and then writing the output of the call back to the sheet? So then these Single Button Apps are just API endpoin…

Same here. If the idea was to make it so non-technical people can use the google sheets + API app, just put a script in the sheet that calls the API? It will appear in a menu inside google sheets itself

I used to put buttons in the menu ( or even side panels ), but nowdays I draw a big button and attach a apps script function to it. Looks more bad ass.

Re: Show HN: Using Google Sheets as the back end/APIs of your app

#143

Post by Karellen »

seanhunter wrote: post #127

Just beware of the modern version of the "Excel noob trap" which lots of investment banks fell into in the 80s and 90s. Spreadsheets are amazing generic calculating frameworks and you can do a ton in them, so a lot of banks ended up building a huge ediface of excel spreadsheets that ran a wide variety of risk, pricing and operational functions. With a few plugins and extensions you can really do amazing things with t…

> Making wide changes becomes hard/impossible

To add to this - no revision control.

OK, maybe you can store your spreadsheets in a RCS, but can you get diffs of the changes, so you can confirm the revision you're about to push is what you meant to do? Can you review the history of diffs, so you can see how the system has changed over time? If multiple people make changes, can you do a merge? Do you even have a separate "working copy" where you can try stuff out, or are you just editing the production copy with no safety harness?

Re: Show HN: Using Google Sheets as the back end/APIs of your app

#144

Post by gremlinunderway »

Yiin wrote: post #140
Maxion wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sadly many companies WANT to be in the excel trap...

Can you elaborate? I understand the reasoning "we need to grow no matter the cost, will deal with problems when they arise", but deliberately sabotaging yourself doesn't sound reasonable.

not op but probably because some people are so used to using spreadsheets that even if you built them a database with custom visualizations, they'd ask for spreadsheet export.

Re: Show HN: Using Google Sheets as the back end/APIs of your app

#145

Post by mananaysiempre »

Karellen wrote: post #143
seanhunter wrote: post #127

Just beware of the modern version of the "Excel noob trap" which lots of investment banks fell into in the 80s and 90s. Spreadsheets are amazing generic calculating frameworks and you can do a ton in them, so a lot of banks ended up building a huge ediface of excel spreadsheets that ran a wide variety of risk, pricing and operational functions. With a few plugins and extensions you can really do amazing things with t…

> Making wide changes becomes hard/impossible To add to this - no revision control. OK, maybe you can store your spreadsheets in a RCS, but can you get diffs of the changes, so you can confirm the revision you're about to push is what you meant to do? Can you review the history of diffs, so you can see how the system has changed over time? If multiple people make changes, can you do a merge? Do you even have a separa…

Only thinking of this now, but a flat OpenDocument shreadsheet (“FODS”, a single XML file, unlike the usual XMLs-in-ZIP flavor) should actually be amenable to text-based version control.

Re: Show HN: Using Google Sheets as the back end/APIs of your app

#147

Post by bronco21016 »

This looks like an awesome product!

I'm currently in a bit of the same problem. Make an MVP of a webapp. What makes my predicament extra annoying is that my toolbox is primarily Microsoft. I have Power Automate, SharePoint, Office365, etc available to me. I do not have Azure unfortunately.

The answer is spin up a flask app with SQL and do things right. Does something like Zerosheets exist for the MS environment?

Really cool product! I'm bookmarking it for future products that don't need to live in MS land.

Re: Show HN: Using Google Sheets as the back end/APIs of your app

#148

Post by mananaysiempre »

Yiin wrote: post #140
Maxion wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sadly many companies WANT to be in the excel trap...

Can you elaborate? I understand the reasoning "we need to grow no matter the cost, will deal with problems when they arise", but deliberately sabotaging yourself doesn't sound reasonable.

For a number of reasons (some of them actually fairly substantial), spreadsheets are the only end-user programming tool that caught on and endured, so users will often choose them. It’s not even that they won’t need to find/hire/allocate programmers, it’s that using them doesn’t seem like a big deal at all.

Of course, just because you told yourself you aren’t doing a software project doesn’t mean you’re not prone to the standard problems of managing those, but the incubation period for many of them is long enough to catch a lot of non-practicioners unaware. I don’t think telling people to leave it to the professionals is the answer, for what it’s worth,—I just don’t see how we get from here to a world where one could interpolate between systems and end-user software more gracefully.

Re: Show HN: Using Google Sheets as the back end/APIs of your app

#149

Post by michaelmior »

Karellen wrote: post #143
seanhunter wrote: post #127

Just beware of the modern version of the "Excel noob trap" which lots of investment banks fell into in the 80s and 90s. Spreadsheets are amazing generic calculating frameworks and you can do a ton in them, so a lot of banks ended up building a huge ediface of excel spreadsheets that ran a wide variety of risk, pricing and operational functions. With a few plugins and extensions you can really do amazing things with t…

> Making wide changes becomes hard/impossible To add to this - no revision control. OK, maybe you can store your spreadsheets in a RCS, but can you get diffs of the changes, so you can confirm the revision you're about to push is what you meant to do? Can you review the history of diffs, so you can see how the system has changed over time? If multiple people make changes, can you do a merge? Do you even have a separa…

> no revision control

I'm not claiming this is a sufficient solution, but Google Sheets does keep a version history and you can see changes. Doesn't solve the problem of working copies and merging though.

Re: Show HN: Using Google Sheets as the back end/APIs of your app

#150

Post by fendy3002 »

michaelmior wrote: post #149
Karellen wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Making wide changes becomes hard/impossible To add to this - no revision control. OK, maybe you can store your spreadsheets in a RCS, but can you get diffs of the changes, so you can confirm the revision you're about to push is what you meant to do? Can you review the history of diffs, so you can see how the system has changed over time? If multiple people make changes, can you do a merge? Do you even have a separa…

> no revision control I'm not claiming this is a sufficient solution, but Google Sheets does keep a version history and you can see changes. Doesn't solve the problem of working copies and merging though.

Try to compare version histories on hundred thousands row of google sheet. It's not a pleasant experience.
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