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I only use Google Sheets

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Re: I only use Google Sheets

#91

Post by Romario77 »

Zigurd wrote: post #74
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.

yes, that's true. It also brings the issues related to that - it's easy to delete the whole org data, change things uncontrollably, corrupt the data, there entries in the tables are free-form (well, you have to do programming to make it more robust).

it works fine initially, but for long term it's usually more productive to have custom software.

Re: I only use Google Sheets

#92

Post by hannofcart »

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…

> especially so for people who can't code.

And for those who can, Appscript gives your spreadsheet super powers.

For those who don't know, you are not stuck with writing JS in the Appscript integrated web IDE that comes with Google sheets (though honestly it's not too bad itself).

Using clasp, you can develop your code locally in an IDE of your choice, in typescript and have a build step compile those to js, and have clasp push it to spreadsheet.

Once you have the tool chain set up the DX is quite nice.

Re: I only use Google Sheets

#93

Post by SoftTalker »

glimshe wrote: post #2

And it all started with Visicalc. The spreadsheet and the word processor are the most important computer programs ever created. No wonder Google and Microsoft still make billions from these two.

Yep they were the original "killer apps" and still are. They are the reason that PCs gained traction in businesses in the 1980s. I helped my chemistry teacher in High School back then to use Visicalc on a TRS-80 as a gradebook. Almost anyone who has used a computer for work has used a spreadsheet for something, whether managing simple lists, or something much more complicated.

Re: I only use Google Sheets

#94

Post by sjw987 »

t_mann wrote: post #75
sjw987 wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

I just sort of wanted to learn how to build (rudimentary) versions of the same apps I've always used made by other companies/people, and like the idea of the data being as clean as possible. I'm a bit of a data purist, so I store all of my photos unedited, and keep all of my text documents as simple as possible (minimal formatting, data-heavy).

I'm also wary of just moving from one product to another, with the hassle of transferring things over constantly, security breaches, product sunsetting and all of those sorts of things.

I'll give Nextcloud a look out of curiosity.

Re: I only use Google Sheets

#95

Post by ajross »

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.

> Plenty of reports of people getting locked out of their Workspace accounts

None substantiating the "most AI-kafkaesque process imaginable to regain access" upthread though. I mean, I don't know what you're citing specifically, but yes, obviously: business relationships like everything else get tangled up sometimes. People's electricity gets shut off incorrectly, people's Doordash orders arrive with the wrong stuff, phone bills arrive without the promised discounts; everything sucks, kinda.

But if you're paying the solution is to call your support contact and have them sort it out. And that works at Google the same way it does everywhere else.

Re: I only use Google Sheets

#96

Post by SoftTalker »

clamorbeclam wrote: post #90

Funny, I recently departed from the google ecosystem to proton, self hosted nextcloud, kagi, Libreoffice, and Apple Maps. Am I giving up some ease of use? Absolutely! Can I live with it? Absolutely! Can google go fuck itself? Hell yea. Libre office is like missing a limb, but with practice it can do anything I want it to.

Google, Excel, Numbers, LibreOffice, close enough as makes no difference for what the vast majority of people do with spreadsheets. And even for more complex use cases, any of them will most likely be fine. Google probably has the edge if you need real-time sharing with multiple people.

Re: I only use Google Sheets

#97

Post by sjw987 »

floundy wrote: post #68
sjw987 wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I'm working on De-Googling. I now have a Mac and an iPhone instead of Windows/Android, but switching from Drive to iCloud seems a fairly parallel move. I also set up my first home server with RAID NAS. It's on my list to spin up an OpenOffice container or something I can use to replace Google Sheets. That will let me delete my Drive data; next is Google Photos and eventually Gmail.

It took about a week for me to completely de-Google from scratch.

Drive was easy enough to download everything off, but the real pain in the arse was Google Photos. I had something like 250 individual 2GB zip files and the supplementary metadata was separated off of the image files themselves. I had to put together some Python scripts to clean up all the different file naming formats over the years (PIXL_YYYYMMDD, IMG_YYYYMMDD) into just YYYYMMDDD, and reattach the metadata, and then check through that everything was safely downloaded before deleting the Google Photos.

Google Photos had some weird caching issues where it kept showing images I'd deleted and emptied from the bin, which was a little concerning. They were only appearing on my phone and persisted multiple times after clearing the cache. I couldn't find them anywhere in the phones internal storage.

Re: I only use Google Sheets

#98

Post by ubermonkey »

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…

I didn't realize it at the time, but I my first encounter with the "solves every problem with a spreadsheet" user type came very early in my career.

I worked in a computer lab in college, ca. 1989. One of my colleagues was in the mechanical engineering program, and had a bias generally for "solve the problem" over "elegant solution" or "appropriate tool" concerns. (I love the guy to this day, to be clear.)

When he first came to work at the lab, he was the only guy to have installed FORTRAN on his workstation. It didn't work well.

Then he discovered Lotus 1-2-3 and its macro language. He DELIGHTED in making the rest of horrified by creating all sorts of boundary-pushing utilities in Lotus macros. To be clear, he was at least 50% "doing a bit", and leaning into the "engineer only knows one tool" gag we'd all been riffing on. But he was still doing absurd stuff in Lotus that would've been better built in, say, Turbo Pascal or Turbo C.

I had no idea back then that this pattern would become so prevalent.

Re: I only use Google Sheets

#99

Post by jeffbee »

dotancohen wrote: post #82
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…

> especially so for people who can't code. Presumably those people learned to use a spreadsheet. What makes learning spreadsheet formulae possible, but SQL, Python, or R impossible?

SQL and to an extent R were both created under the assumption that most people were not inclined to learn to program the computer. They could be expected to speak English and understand relational algebra, but they couldn't be expected to learn an imperative programming language. The existence of SQL stands as proof that at least some people 50 years ago thought there were multiple classes of user.

Re: I only use Google Sheets

#100

Post by thesuitonym »

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…

Another oft overlooked point is that anti-spreadsheet people aren't actually against using spreadsheets, we just want our coworkers to stop placing mission critical operations in an enormous, half-baked spreadsheet that exists only in some long-since retired users home directory.
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