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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

#121

Post by bambax »

zie wrote: 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…

There are extensions that let you query Excel worksheet files directly from SQLite (no importing, no transformation, just direct query). It's quite fun to do; you can use Excel (or Libre office, etc.) to maintain the spreadsheet, and build reports with SQLite.

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

#122

Post by [deleted] »

lwhi wrote: post #100

This is giving me flashbacks to the days when MS Access (and later on Visual Basic) ruled this segment of the market. It's interesting to think there's still a market for this type of small scale enthusiast application. One scenarios I've been thinking about recently is the death of the generic app. If LLMs end up being able to create software easily, why wouldn't we choose to have software that's totally aligned our…

[deleted]

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

#123

Post by animal531 »

I used to work on some really complicated old code for a long term incentive management company where each client had a ton of their own rules, but once those were set up they would be running fine for 3 or 5 year cycles without any issues. The difficult part was to fit their requirements and rules into our code.

At some point I started working on a new version that would just run with a spreadsheet as the frontend where the business analyst could add whatever rules and calculation fields they wanted, which would then link to some input of users, share values, periods etc.

It was going quite well and seemed extremely viable but unfortunately the business died due to some other issues along with Covid before the software saw the light of day.

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

#124

Post by javier2 »

fragmede wrote: post #63
worthless-trash wrote: post #57

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

Is 25k a lot? I regularly make google sheets with 400k rows, but those are manual csv dumps from a real database that I just import

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

#125

Post by pxeger1 »

homebrewer wrote: post #117
smusamashah wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Monzo (online bank in UK) let you see all your transactions in a Google sheet (with some caveats e.g. interest earned is skipped). I wanted to make a total wealth chart over all years. It's so damn complicated in Google sheets. In MS Excel I could simply make a pivot chart, apply any aggregation on days/weeks and be done with it. But with Sheets I had to make a new aggregate column, filter data in another new column,…

You're fine with Google seeing complete information about your income and spending? I'm not one of those truly paranoid, but this seems like a bit too much.

What’s your risk model here? Google are not manually or automatically inspecting the contents of your spreadsheets in order to profile you and show you better-personalised ads. Not enough people have such a spreadsheet for it to be worth it for them, I’m sure - and they also probably already know approximately how wealthy you are. Unless you’re under investigation for fraud or something, I doubt the government could get much use out of being able to access your financial spreadsheets via Google compared to the information they already get directly from banks etc. So that only really leaves criminals (for whom I still can’t see a great incentive to read your spreadsheets), and I also don’t really think your Google account is much less secure than your computer’s local storage (if that’s the other place you would keep it)

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

#126

Post by cootsnuck »

homebrewer wrote: post #117
smusamashah wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Monzo (online bank in UK) let you see all your transactions in a Google sheet (with some caveats e.g. interest earned is skipped). I wanted to make a total wealth chart over all years. It's so damn complicated in Google sheets. In MS Excel I could simply make a pivot chart, apply any aggregation on days/weeks and be done with it. But with Sheets I had to make a new aggregate column, filter data in another new column,…

You're fine with Google seeing complete information about your income and spending? I'm not one of those truly paranoid, but this seems like a bit too much.

I hope you don't use Gmail if that's your attitude lol.

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

#127

Post by londons_explore »

homebrewer wrote: post #117
smusamashah wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Monzo (online bank in UK) let you see all your transactions in a Google sheet (with some caveats e.g. interest earned is skipped). I wanted to make a total wealth chart over all years. It's so damn complicated in Google sheets. In MS Excel I could simply make a pivot chart, apply any aggregation on days/weeks and be done with it. But with Sheets I had to make a new aggregate column, filter data in another new column,…

You're fine with Google seeing complete information about your income and spending? I'm not one of those truly paranoid, but this seems like a bit too much.

I only care about humans seeing my data.

Most big tech companies very rarely/never let a human review private customer data. Therefore I'm fine handing all the data over to big tech companies.

I don't really understand any other point of view - if you're worried about a machine seeing your private stuff, why did you type it into a keyboard in the first place?

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

#128

Post by xtiansimon »

anyfactor wrote: post #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 enter…

Slightly off-topic.

In small business accounting, I have a persistent need for a FileMaker Pro like solution for invoices. FMP was conscious of on-screen layout and print.

ReTool has been recommended as similar replacement for FMP but they don’t have the idea of creating print-ready documented receipts and invoices. You don’t even need to print it, you just need to keep it for the IRS.

I love the idea of using Google Sheets and turnkey app building apps. But I still need documentation.

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

#129

Post by llamaimperative »

dcre wrote: post #64
llamaimperative wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Definitely interesting. I think if I was going to put in the effort of switching, it would probably be to more of a labor of love pain in the ass situation like Obsidian where I can be more in control. My use case would easily fit into the Fibery free plan. Amusingly, their own comparison page argues that Notion is a better fit for me: “Where Fibery works better? Processes and work management for medium and large tea…

I’m a heavy Obsidian user personally, started using Fibery for my startup, and now I’m starting to use Fibery for personal stuff over Obsidian as well.

Obsidian is a better note-taker, but Fibery is much more programmable and has the most important OOTB feature of Obsidian which is bidirectional linking (IMO).

I don’t think Fibery gives you less control except in the sense of like data ownership (which is what brought me to Obsidian back in the day).

More key bindings for Fibery would also be appreciated :)

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