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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

#71
post #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 u…

If you have more than a few thousand records, this is the wrong tool for the job. I've used Google Sheets as a "database" for a few applications in the past. In each case, it was an internal tool that did not generate more than a few thousand records, if that.

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

#72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thank you for discussing this openly, it can be a real bummer to write something, test it, have something work up to a point then fail due to situations outside your control. You probably just saved me about 20 hours of coding.

to be fair, 25k rows seems like a few more rows than I'd use a spreadsheet for

Wait till you hear about the spreadsheets researchers use... My chemist friend uses Excel files that regularly exceed 2GB of just text...

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

#73
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.

I was commissioned to make a video explaining what Fivery is and what makes it powerful. It was a couple of years ago, but I believe the core principles still stand. In case someone is interested to learn more and is ok with video format, check it out: https://youtu.be/ddgJGoQBdtQ

I think Fibery is a very interesting product and an incredibly powerful platform. Developed by a small team.

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

#74

Let go of your complex solutions. Spreadsheets were the right answer all along.

My wife had surgery last summer and had about 10 medications she needed to take immediately afterwards - each of them had their own period so I needed to know what we took, and what was "overdue" at any point in time.

I whipped up a spreadsheet in google sheets and added a google form that allowed me to quickly pick a medication that was just taken - it'd enter it into the sheet and an "overview" page would show me what was pending, with color coding if something was "overdue".

I felt like I was abusing what a spreadsheet was meant for but it worked quite well.

If I knew about Glide I probably could have made it look even nicer.

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

#75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Did you skip web design 101? If it’s simple enough, you can absolutely slap it together with jQuery and html.

Time is a valuable resource. This doesn’t simply boil down to one’s abilities—for most of us, opportunity cost is an important factor. If I’m just trying to get some value out of some data, why waste time playing web developer, fighting CSS, dealing with CORS issues, etc., when I could simply use an existing tool that already has my use case covered?

Why waste your time? Some of us are just in it for the love of the game

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

#76
post #54

I'm looking for a no code platform that I can use for my customers and charge a subscription for access. Most of these no-code solutions target internal company Intranets. But, I want to use them for apps I can sell to customers. Does anyone have recommendations?

I am also interested in this.

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

#79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

to be fair, 25k rows seems like a few more rows than I'd use a spreadsheet for

Wait till you hear about the spreadsheets researchers use... My chemist friend uses Excel files that regularly exceed 2GB of just text...

which is an awful idea because some versions of Excel will, if you open a file with more than 1million rows (or ~16k columns), automatically truncate and delete the excess data! And don't even get me started on automatic date conversion.

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

#80

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 enter…

Love it. I think my prototyping capabilities just extended by this comment
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