Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

I only use Google Sheets

mayberay.bearblog.dev

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

151–160 of 361 posts

Re: I only use Google Sheets

#151

Post by scythe »

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…

This comment prompted me to go look at the various spreadsheet software available, since I was only familiar with the usual Excel / GS / Libre. There is also GNOME's Gnumeric, KDE's Calligra, Apple's Numbers, an online variant of LibreOffice called Collabora, an Excel clone made by a German company called PlanMaker, a Latvian effort called OnlyOffice, and then probably the most unusual variant, but somehow it isn't surprising that somebody made a spreadsheet based on Python:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pyspread

Re: I only use Google Sheets

#152

Post by freehorse »

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…

> It's the best authoring tool we've ever devised.

It is also a very bad co-authoring tool imo unless you have a very tight team and processes of how to use spreadsheets. I would not mind if I was using it alone. But spreadsheets encourage a certain naive "visual" approach to structuring data in them that can become an issue if you want to import the data to actually process it somewhere and your coworkers don't really understand this well.

Spreadsheets can be useful, however:

1. Speaking about excel in particular, localisation issues are an absolute nightmare if you happen to live in the wrong country (commas vs dots for decimal points) especially while importing CSV files (which is already unnecessarily complicated in excel). If somehow you don't notice these issues, you end up with wrong data without understanding there the error came from.

2. If your coworkers do not really understand very well how spreadsheets work, you quickly get to become really frustrated with issues coming up when you have to import a spreadsheet for actual processing. Datetimes with different forms, coloured boxes being meaningful, mixtures of text and numbers and whatnot.

Yes a big part of it is "people problem" rather than "technology problem" but imo spreadsheet technology (excel, google sheets etc) encourages a variety of practices that make it less reliable. If the technology gives you the freedom to mess up too easily, imo it is not just a people problem.

Re: I only use Google Sheets

#153

Post by thewebguyd »

bluGill wrote: post #79
jeroenhd wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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

It’s tricky because a lot of these spreadsheet “apps” are made when the business is young. Specifically non-tech companies who don’t have IT departments let alone any developers. They hire an MSP, get office, and go to town in Excel.

By the time they do get big enough to hire internal IT, the Rube Goldberg system is entrenched. Then by the time they get big enough again to need an internal dev team because off the shelf SaaS no longer cuts it, it’s too late. It’d take too many dev resources too much time and money to fix the spreadsheets, design databases, and start popping out web apps.

Plus the software development process is too rigid for how fast business requirements can change. The accounting department will just do it in Excel in an afternoon instead of being willing to wait 2+ weeks for the next sprint.

So we end up at a place in big enterprises where only some things get successfully moved to something more robust but there just isn’t enough resources (or will to allocate those resources) to tackle every spreadsheet, and so there are always key parts of the business that will forever run on Excel.

Re: I only use Google Sheets

#154

Post by mebizzle »

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?

Telling everyone to learn Python to solve all of their problems is not a legitimate or realistic suggestion or solution.

Re: I only use Google Sheets

#155

Post by 1-more »

breadwinner wrote: post #144
Ajedi32 wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've long wondered why there's not a more incremental transition path from spreadsheets to a full blown database with a custom UI. It just seems like spreadsheets are right on the cusp of being able to fill that that role but lack just a few key features which might make it viable (structured data, native SQL query support, custom UI elements, IDE integration, etc).

> incremental transition path from spreadsheets to a full blown database There are plenty of tools for that. Airtable comes to mind, or if you want to use your own database try: https://visualdb.com/

At my old gig, all of our content generation was in Google sheets or Airtable.

Anything we made would have _never_ been as good a UI and would have stopped us from being able to publish new content. The other nice thing about them is you can scale the integration effort. You can download a sheet from GS as a CSV then upload that in an admin page and you can probably ship that feature today. A tiny bit more effort and you can add a 3rd dimension to the data by finding an XSLX library and exporting the page as an Excel workbook. Eventually you can do something with their API where you just click "reload data from the master sheet" and you can generate all the data you need to preview the changes on the frontend. That's what our Airtable integration looked like. Airtable was very "pull this in via API" native and had a better way of expressing higher dimensional data in cells which matched nicely with Postgres storing arrays in cells.

Re: I only use Google Sheets

#156

Post by Zigurd »

Romario77 wrote: post #91
Zigurd wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Google Workspace apps all (?) have versioning.

Re: I only use Google Sheets

#157

Post by Zigurd »

freehorse wrote: post #152
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…

> It's the best authoring tool we've ever devised. It is also a very bad co-authoring tool imo unless you have a very tight team and processes of how to use spreadsheets. I would not mind if I was using it alone. But spreadsheets encourage a certain naive "visual" approach to structuring data in them that can become an issue if you want to import the data to actually process it somewhere and your coworkers don't real…

Having worked on Lotus Notes, I am acutely aware that groupware wasn't the answer either.

Re: I only use Google Sheets

#158

Post by jfengel »

hannofcart wrote: post #92
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…

Ah, thank you for that. I want to write an extremely basic transform on my spreadsheet, and Googling failed to turn up how one did that.

Re: I only use Google Sheets

#159

Post by criddell »

ksec wrote: post #88

Slightly Off Topic, are there any other online SpreadSheets other than Excel 365 and Google Sheets? Some of them are AirTable like which is CRM focus, but I just want a really simple spreadsheet that is easily accessible and not from Big Tech.

The web version of Apple Numbers is pretty good although I suppose it doesn't meet your non-big-tech criteria.

Re: I only use Google Sheets

#160

Post by jd3 »

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…

We bought a Google Workspace subscription for a building I help manage and I was shocked when I found out that you can't archive emails for discovery/legal purposes unless you buy a more expensive subscription that has access to the "vault."

We already pay nearly $90/mo for 6 seats!

Post reply on HN