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I only use Google Sheets

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Re: I only use Google Sheets

#71

Post by throwuxiytayq »

crazygringo wrote: post #58
TrackerFF wrote: post #22

One thing I've learned: Never ( ever ) make yourself reliant/dependent on Google products. If you do get banned / locked out, it is the most AI-Kafkaesque process imaginable to regain access. And you could stay locked out for years. I use Google sheets myself from time to time, but I regularly do backups of the sheets I'm working on, or anything important I have access to. I've been in the hole before, for reasons I…

I assume you're talking about the free consumer tier? Nothing like that should happen if you're paying for even an individual Workspace plan. You get a phone number for customer support, and it works. Google shuts down free accounts when it believes they're being used for fraud/spam. And because scammers and spammers create them at virtually zero cost, and will fake activity to build account credibility until using t…

Plenty of reports of people getting locked out of their Workspace accounts. Google even occasionally burns developers they have deals and working relationships with.

Just don't use any Google services. Not free, not paid (why would you send them money???!?!). Not for personal stuff, not for work projects. Not for throwaway data, not for important data.

Re: I only use Google Sheets

#72

Post by Loughla »

nashashmi wrote: post #36

This is what we did in Excel. Is Google Sheet better somehow? Or is that only what new age kids know since college has adopted google products?

I love excel and use it daily in my bullshit admin job.

But google sheets is so much easier if you have more than one person interacting with the data. It just works, easily, every time. Even with 365 or whatever for MS products, they're more cumbersome.

Re: I only use Google Sheets

#73

Post by bluGill »

CGMthrowaway wrote: post #60
TrackerFF wrote: post #22

One thing I've learned: Never ( ever ) make yourself reliant/dependent on Google products. If you do get banned / locked out, it is the most AI-Kafkaesque process imaginable to regain access. And you could stay locked out for years. I use Google sheets myself from time to time, but I regularly do backups of the sheets I'm working on, or anything important I have access to. I've been in the hole before, for reasons I…

You're right about google's track record but at heart yours is a comment about third-party cloud dependency, not google. As you mention, offline storage solves this and another commenter mentioned msft will ban you also (but you dont hear about it because...offline storage)

Track record is a factor that you should consider.

When companies buy services from others they often ensure that the contract has protection from things like this. They have clauses that the data belongs to them. They have clauses about what happens if the company is sold. They have clauses about abandoning the product. They have a number of other things added that I'm not aware of.

You as a single individual (and often as a small business) don't have the power to get that into a contract. However you still should read the fine print - you should go elsewhere if it the fine print is against you.

Re: I only use Google Sheets

#74

Post by Zigurd »

corry wrote: post #59

Always overlooked point in these pro/anti-spreadsheet discussions: A spreadsheet gives you a DB, a quickly and easily customized UI, and iterative / easy-to-debug data processing all in a package that everyone in the working world already understands. AND with a freedom that allows the creator to do it however they want. AND it's fairly portable. You can build incredible things in spreadsheets. I remain convinced tha…

The Google suite of Apps was born multiuser. They perform better then Microsoft's apps when multiple people, even dozens of them, are bashing on a single shared document. Document sharing is more powerful than sharing a window or a desktop. It changes the way people work together.

Re: I only use Google Sheets

#75

Post by t_mann »

sjw987 wrote: post #34
TrackerFF wrote: post #22

One thing I've learned: Never ( ever ) make yourself reliant/dependent on Google products. If you do get banned / locked out, it is the most AI-Kafkaesque process imaginable to regain access. And you could stay locked out for years. I use Google sheets myself from time to time, but I regularly do backups of the sheets I'm working on, or anything important I have access to. I've been in the hole before, for reasons I…

I can't tell whether I'm being super paranoid but I've been burned by Google so many times on product sunsets that I've just removed all of my data from them. I managed to set up private self-hosted versions of an email client, photo viewing app, and barebones alternative to Docs and Sheets. Switched from Google to Kagi, and Chrome to Brave, but generally keep my own bookmarks of sites to use rather than using search…

Sounds like you're not using something like Nextcloud (which should cover all your bases it seems). Any particular reason, any experiences you want to share?

Re: I only use Google Sheets

#76

Post by yomismoaqui »

Cthulhu_ wrote: post #66
bluGill wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wish there was a better way to make spreadsheets use a database as a backend. Most of what people do with a spreadsheet would be better done in a database - but a database needs a lot more training to use (if you don't have the training you will make something worse than spreadsheet with your database!)

Wasn't Microsoft Access basically that? There's also Google's AppSheet, which may be that too.

Microsoft Access requires more training (tables, foreign keys...) and from experience most of the people using Excel managed to bend it to do what they wanted.

The maintainability of the resulting systems was not great, but they did the job and worse is better I guess..

Re: I only use Google Sheets

#77

Post by Spooky23 »

throwuxiytayq wrote: post #71
crazygringo wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I assume you're talking about the free consumer tier? Nothing like that should happen if you're paying for even an individual Workspace plan. You get a phone number for customer support, and it works. Google shuts down free accounts when it believes they're being used for fraud/spam. And because scammers and spammers create them at virtually zero cost, and will fake activity to build account credibility until using t…

Plenty of reports of people getting locked out of their Workspace accounts. Google even occasionally burns developers they have deals and working relationships with. Just don't use any Google services. Not free, not paid (why would you send them money???!?!). Not for personal stuff, not for work projects. Not for throwaway data, not for important data.

The Google rage on HN is immature.

That's a feature of any SaaS. Adobe frequently shuts down ETLA customers due their own invoice processing failures. I can think of three significant government subdivisions that were unable to access any M365 service for 1-10 days as a result of a reseller change.

The real lesson here is that you need to understand the failure domains of the technology your business depends on. Your business is as good as the contracts you rely on. We're relatively good at preparing for IT failure, but not so much the other stuff. For small businesses, key revenue generation could be stopped by an employee doing something dumb with a corporate card.

Re: I only use Google Sheets

#78

Post by bdcravens »

adrianbooth17 wrote: post #5

I use Google Sheets for all my finances, it's great. I have an Expense Tracker UI within Google Sheets that allows me to submit expenses to the main sheet (currently just over 5000 rows of expenses over the last few years) I only just recently vibe coded a web UI tool that uses a Google Service Account to add expenses to this Google Sheet for me, and then created a Progressive Web App from that so I could do everythi…

I've done the same for a long time. I've tried so many purpose-built alternatives, and always come back to my solution. (Funny enough, Microsoft Money from 20+ years ago is closer to what I'd like than anything available today)

Not to say there aren't features I wish I could easily have. I could of course build it, and I've "started" so many times, but after a few hours of the typical boilerplate code you have to deal with, I'd always give up and go back to my surefire solution.

(This was before vibe coding, so I may take a stab at that)

Re: I only use Google Sheets

#79

Post by bluGill »

jeroenhd wrote: post #33
salviati wrote: post #3

Reminds me of "Ask HN: Is the world run by badly updated Excel sheets?" [0] You need experience to see the shorcomings of spreadsheets. No version control. No tests. In general it's good for things that don't need to evolve, but stay the same (most likely because they're short lived). [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33611431 [EDIT] An example of a comment from that thread pointing in this direction: > In gen…

> No version control You can use version control with Excel spreadsheets, though it's not very good. It's called "track changes" and even has a limited capacity to approve/reject changes from other people. Very few people uses that feature, especially not the people who have built a Rube Goldberg machine to run their business processes, but you could do it if you wanted to.

The people who have "built a Rube Goldberg machine to run their business processes" should have used a database not a spreadsheet. Though they likely don't have enough training in database design and so if they had their result would be worse - but that is the fault of their lack of training. To be fair, database training is not something they should have in their position

Re: I only use Google Sheets

#80

Post by Spooky23 »

throwaway290 wrote: post #37
AJ007 wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A good reason why no one should ever have their Windows install linked to a Microsoft account, same for MacOS.

Who ever lost apple account by being banned? with no recourse? I don't remember a story like that

I've never heard a rant about people being banned, but i can think of a half dozen people who have lost their icloud accounts due to the combo of inexplicably not remembering or writing down their passwords and selling or losing a phone.
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