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I keep turning my Google Sheets into phone-friendly webapps

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Re: I keep turning my Google Sheets into phone-friendly webapps

#41
post #9

Why lock down to a nocode tool instead of just hacking together a simple html5 page? Ai assistants have speed up the prototype workflow for doing less code/design.

Cause guy does not code perhaps? Otherwise siding with this comment thread. Claude indeed does super rapid html5 dev a child’s play.

Re: I keep turning my Google Sheets into phone-friendly webapps

#43
post #39
post #26

I use Notion databases for this. They're essentially spreadsheets with customizable table, list, kanban views, and each row gets its own wiki-style page in addition to the structured data. So it's nice for lists of books or movies or games, where you have some metadata but you also might want to take notes on it when you read/watch/play. It works pretty well for this purpose, but I also could probably make Obsidian o…

A little know Google product is called Tables[0]. Very similar to what you’re describing. Another is AppSheet[1] for a more drag and drop application builder. [0]: https://tables.area120.google.com/ [1]: https://about.appsheet.com/home/

From the Tables page:

Important update: The Beta program is now closed Tables is no longer accepting new users for its Beta program

Re: I keep turning my Google Sheets into phone-friendly webapps

#44
post #26

I use Notion databases for this. They're essentially spreadsheets with customizable table, list, kanban views, and each row gets its own wiki-style page in addition to the structured data. So it's nice for lists of books or movies or games, where you have some metadata but you also might want to take notes on it when you read/watch/play. It works pretty well for this purpose, but I also could probably make Obsidian o…

I badly, badly wish Obsidian had some kind of database/spreadsheet feature. I'm limping along with LibreOffice spreadsheets for privacy, but it's a pain having my notes in two different formats. And I miss grep.

Re: I keep turning my Google Sheets into phone-friendly webapps

#45
post #43
post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A little know Google product is called Tables[0]. Very similar to what you’re describing. Another is AppSheet[1] for a more drag and drop application builder. [0]: https://tables.area120.google.com/ [1]: https://about.appsheet.com/home/

From the Tables page: Important update: The Beta program is now closed Tables is no longer accepting new users for its Beta program

Also,

> Table’s features and capabilities are now integrated into AppSheet, our no-code platform that blah blah blah

Seems like a usual Google product in that if you use it, you'll be forced to migrate all your data/workflows to some shiny new thing every few years.

Re: I keep turning my Google Sheets into phone-friendly webapps

#46
I've built quite a few dashboards while working on proof-of-concept feature/product engineering. Even though people often think I'm joking, almost always the backend database was a Google Sheet. Google Sheets has great API support, easy to write functionality, convenient read and file dumps, works well with Pandas/SQL, and has a universally appreciated UX. Data validation can be annoying if the "admin" directly enters data, but for building a proof of concept, nothing beats Google Sheets. The data from Google Sheets would be passed through an API to a web UI/dashboard. The dashboard I built for end users was a simple Bootstrap (Vue-Bootstrap) table from the API, with enough easy-to-use filters and views to work out of the box. If the data was too large, I would use a templated snippet to convert the JSON into a card view. Ignoring long-term maintainability, this was one of the most foolproof ways to build dashboards. After that, I'd slap Firebase Auth on top, and that was it.

I haven't worked on these types of projects for nearly two years now. Folks I know use Retool or Softr with an API connectivity platform like Portable, Pipedream, or Zapier. If you're staring at a spreadsheet on a daily basis, the next step should be looking into an app builder combined with an API connection platform.

Re: I keep turning my Google Sheets into phone-friendly webapps

#47
post #26

I use Notion databases for this. They're essentially spreadsheets with customizable table, list, kanban views, and each row gets its own wiki-style page in addition to the structured data. So it's nice for lists of books or movies or games, where you have some metadata but you also might want to take notes on it when you read/watch/play. It works pretty well for this purpose, but I also could probably make Obsidian o…

You should check out Fibery. It’s ultimately like Notion but a lot more performant and less “finicky” due to being too clever about UX, in my opinion.

Re: I keep turning my Google Sheets into phone-friendly webapps

#48
post #26

I use Notion databases for this. They're essentially spreadsheets with customizable table, list, kanban views, and each row gets its own wiki-style page in addition to the structured data. So it's nice for lists of books or movies or games, where you have some metadata but you also might want to take notes on it when you read/watch/play. It works pretty well for this purpose, but I also could probably make Obsidian o…

I badly, badly wish Obsidian had some kind of database/spreadsheet feature. I'm limping along with LibreOffice spreadsheets for privacy, but it's a pain having my notes in two different formats. And I miss grep.

What would you use this feature for?

Re: I keep turning my Google Sheets into phone-friendly webapps

#50
I tried going all on on Google Sheets earlier this year. I used the Python API and like almost nothing worked consistently.

I got 1 sheet to work well with like 1k rows and thought woohoo this is great! So I went all-in, put 25k rows in and Google pooped the bed. It gave errors all the time, rows and columns were funky. API issues galore.

SQLite however handled 25k rows without any errors, always rock solid.

I gave up. Overall a terrible experience once I got past 1k rows. I'm glad it's worked well for you.

I only had like 10 columns, so it wasn't like massive amounts of data. I was linking to a file out in Google Drive and that was where most of my issues were. Google drive's API was 99.99% completely useless.

My takeaway from the experience was, Google proclaims they have an API, but it seems more like nobody tests it or cares about it. Perhaps it's malicious compliance, they have it because they have to have an API, but not because they expect anyone to actually use it.

Perhaps I'm just not cool enough for Google.

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