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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

#201

Post by omolobo »

londons_explore wrote: post #127
homebrewer wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

[dead]

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

#202

Post by jayd16 »

You can easily add some user input with Forms and with some setup you can get SSO and require Google auth to the Forms and Sheets. You can also throw up some async jobs in Google Cloud Run functions.

I automated some IT processes this way. These were tasks that were already a bit manual (like on/off boarding hires) and needed flexible workflows but would be helped with automation.

When the scale is small it can be a nice little toolbox.

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

#203

Post by ajcp »

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…

Not just totally aligned, but also "just-in-time" and ephemeral: an LLM goes and does/builds it on request, and then destroys all artifacts when the request has been fulfilled?

If the persistence of something incurs a cost in storage and security, and the traditional penalties of efficiency and learning-curves are removed, why not recreate it every time its needed?

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

#204

Post by Closi »

flokie wrote: post #195
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,…

What about just plain old query() SQL i usually find the easiest vs. mucking around with pivot tables.

SQL is fine if you don't want to play with the data interactively - but that's the real benefit of Pivot Tables.

Things like drilling through, filtering/slicing, and then generating a graph, all in SaaS without having to run anything local.

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

#205

Post by imchillyb »

sneak wrote: post #193
martyvis wrote: post #192

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Actually I have heard the exact opposite of what you are stating is true. Both Google and Apple fight very hard to avoid handing data to authorities. They don't want to be seen as some sort of easy conduit to government surveillance or shill. How does that benefit their reputation? I know of one case where Google spent millions on lawyers fighting government wanting access to an activist's email. Their FAQ here makes…

Apple’s own transparency report indicates they turn over data to the USG for over 100,000 different apple IDs each year in the no-warrant-or-probable-cause (FISA orders and NSLs) category. (Mind you; this includes device location histories due to geoip logs, unique identifiers, iMessage histories, photos, documents, everything.) The cases they are allowed to tell you about aren’t in this category. They aren’t even al…

> ...no-warrant-or-probable-cause (FISA orders and NSLs)...

These are not equivalents, nor are they similar. FISA = Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court / NSL = National Security Letter.

If a person is the target of the FISA system, there most certainly is probable cause.

National Security Letter is a gag order, given by the intelligence community, in order to protect national security.

Again, if you or your organization receives one of these, there most certainly is probable cause.

These systems may be detestable, but there's no need to make things up.

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

#206

Post by dragonwriter »

sneak wrote: post #193
martyvis wrote: post #192

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Actually I have heard the exact opposite of what you are stating is true. Both Google and Apple fight very hard to avoid handing data to authorities. They don't want to be seen as some sort of easy conduit to government surveillance or shill. How does that benefit their reputation? I know of one case where Google spent millions on lawyers fighting government wanting access to an activist's email. Their FAQ here makes…

Apple’s own transparency report indicates they turn over data to the USG for over 100,000 different apple IDs each year in the no-warrant-or-probable-cause (FISA orders and NSLs) category. (Mind you; this includes device location histories due to geoip logs, unique identifiers, iMessage histories, photos, documents, everything.) The cases they are allowed to tell you about aren’t in this category. They aren’t even al…

> Apple’s own transparency report indicates they turn over data to the USG for over 100,000 different apple IDs each year in the no-warrant-or-probable-cause (FISA orders and NSLs) category.

FISA “orders” are warrants and have the same requirement for probable cause as any search or seizure warrant (they aren't criminal warrants so the probable cause is not of there being evidence of a crime, but of the target being an agent of a foreign power.)

NSLs are administrative subpoenas accompanied with gag orders, not warrants, and correspondingly do not have a probable cause requirement; unlike warrants (and like other subpoenas), they are subject to precompliance challenge (and the associated gag order is challengable separately.)

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

#207

Post by zem »

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…

I've built a scrabble tournament management app on google sheets, because it was the easiest way I could think of to let multiple people edit it with all the others seeing live updates. From a developer's point of view it kind of sucks, having to maintain everything in one large javascript file and having to use spreadsheet tabs as input and output, not to mention manually attaching the script to a new sheet for every tournament. But the user experience has been excellent, modulo a few permissions glitches.

I'm still trying to rewrite it as a self hosted web app this year because the aforementioned permissions glitches and the difficulty of doing versioned deployments has made me reluctant to continue relying on google, but overall sheets has been a huge boon and we have gotten years of use out of it.

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

#208

Post by smusamashah »

maxique wrote: post #169
miki123211 wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My bank just exports to CSV, which is trivially importable to Excel, Sheets, Pandas or whatever else you need.

As I understand it, the appeal of Monzo's way is it's live updating rather than having to log in to some horribly outdated online banking portal and manually export

Yes exactly. The Google sheet is live. I couldn't just add a column in live sheet either. I had to copy the sheet using a formula so that its always up to date. And still had to use to other sheets. Chart is in the 4th sheet.

In excel I would not have to do any of that.

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

#209

Post by smusamashah »

BillinghamJ wrote: post #110
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,…

Google Sheets can do that - https://officewheel.com/group-dates-in-pivot-table-google-sh...

This is the text book answer. Not something you can actually do on a live sheet with all transactions. If you want to use a different aggregate e.g. week instead of month or skip first year or something like that you will be making these columns all over again.

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

#210

Post by smusamashah »

Closi wrote: post #204
flokie wrote: post #195

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What about just plain old query() SQL i usually find the easiest vs. mucking around with pivot tables.

SQL is fine if you don't want to play with the data interactively - but that's the real benefit of Pivot Tables. Things like drilling through, filtering/slicing, and then generating a graph, all in SaaS without having to run anything local.

Yes exactly, excel's Pivot tables and charts are more powerful.
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