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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.
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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.
I see these complaints on HN a lot, and maybe it’s anecdotal, but I just don’t see this in the real world these days. If someone shares a sheet with me, it’s for the intended purpose of sharing data and/or visualizations of that data. I’ve always been a huge fan of spreadsheets, and the rare times I’ve encountered them being misused, it was a long time ago, and not near enough to make me an “anti-spreadsheet” person.…
To say that it was a nightmare was an understatement. They were willing to dump vast sums of money to get something better, but they'd homebrewed so many human processes to deal with the spreadsheet that they struggled to adapt to a more conventional way of doing things.
Due to both the third party doctrine as well as FAA702, the feds do not require warrants to access, copy, process, and store indefinitely all information you provide to Google.
Good luck!
Right or wrong, it takes a certain amount of chutzpah to put forth such a definite opinion after less than a year in the workforce.
What OP probably misses is the "there ain't nothing so permanent as a temporary solution" thing. I too embrace quick and dirty solutions but only if I have total control over the lifetime of that solution. If someone's going to ask me to deliver it immediately and then build a castle on top of it... I might insist on using a tool that has more up front cost.
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.
Try out rowzero.io! It's a pure spreadsheet like Sheets/Excel, but with a much larger row limit.
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You need to give them a tool that's as easy to use as a spreadsheet, and yet stores data in a relational database. There are plenty of spreadsheet-database hybrids in the market.
Using any tool but Excel has the same problem as finding programmers who are willing to use some obscure proprietary programming language. They're going to worry about career lock if they're not developing portable skills. Even though Excel is proprietary too, it's ubiquitous enough that people don't have to worry about it.
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Data > Protect sheets and ranges, choose Protect range or Protect sheet, and then click Set permissions to customize who can edit them. What Problem?
and they save versions every edit or every few minutes too. It's free version control that you cannot forget to turn on Huge contrast with MS approach to this
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As someone who has been to multiple trade shows to show off our own spreadsheet product that solves some of these problems ( https://rowzero.io/home ), I can tell you there are a bunch of data engineers and their managers who have a visceral hatred of spreadsheets but have trouble articulating any reason for it.
Feels a bit like the no-code paradox though. When you make a sufficiently advanced no-code (or no-database) tool it becomes equivalent to code (or a database) and even though it does entice a novice to start using it, a complex system made in it is still complex code (or a complex database) and ends up requiring a competent programmer (or db admin) to maintain it, who wishes it was written the normal way to begin wit…
In other words, one of the core use cases for a spreadsheet is that it empowers a broad swathe of users (broader than Tableau or PowerBI) to quickly extract insights from their data to fill immediate needs.
Or at least, that's a core use case if you can get your data into a spreadsheet without too much trouble.
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>Wasn't Microsoft Access basically that? No because the datagrid in MS Access is too rigid and doesn't have the extensive slice-&-dice features of MS Excel. My first consulting gig was creating customized MS Access applications. Despite that experience, I use MS Excel today because I know that MS Access is too limiting.
>> Wasn't Microsoft Access basically that? > No because the datagrid in MS Access is too rigid and doesn't have the extensive slice-&-dice features of MS Excel. i'm not saying it worked or worked well, but i'm pretty sure the point of Access in the office suite was so that you could access Access (get the clever marketing?) data from within Excel and then do all the excel things you were used to. anyone know if that…