211–220 of 361 posts
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One of the surprising things about working inside of $MegaCorp is that if you knock on enough doors, you'll eventually find that each org has, like, one dude* with a spread sheet that powers everything else. Teams will get spun up to try to "automate" this spreadsheet, but, on a long enough time horizon, the spreadsheet wins.
And it was probably created without approval.
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…
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Are any of them as easy to use as a spreadsheet?
I would say Airtable is. Or if your users are slightly more technical you can try https://visualdb.com/ because it lets you use your own Postgres instance as the backend db.
You can whip up whatever you want now with an LLM. And with JS it will save whatever you want in indexeddb or pouchdb and export to whatever formats like csv. Why lock into google?
One thing to note is that a spreadsheet (OPs insistence on calling it "Google Sheet" is amusing after years of hearing people call it "excel", it's a spreadsheet, people!) is a poor-man's relational database, with most spreadsheets having a single table, or multiple tables but modeling no relations. And you can't model relations in a spreadsheet in any meaningful way (imposing constraints, checking integrity, etc).
Written from the perspective of someone who makes a living providing a SaaS for (among others) inventory control, for which a spreadsheet is a direct competitor. Also, from the perspective of someone who has seen a lot of customer spreadsheets with inventory, not one of them in any way correct or containing good data.
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 keep telling people to make backups of "cloud" services ever since Grooveshark died from one day to the next Maybe Spotify won't be taken down overnight, but they can lock me out for various reasons such as misdetecting an IP address (Google wouldn't let me log in at all when they thought I was in Russia, when I was at 31C3 in Hamburg, Germany, a conference where they afaik use some temporary IP space — I don't kno…
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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.…
Otherwise, I find them to be great deliverables.
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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.
That's true, nothing is as ubiquitous as Excel. But Excel is not designed for multiple people simultaneously updating data. At some point you need a database.
Why? It's easy and quick to code complicated things these days. It's nice having custom dashboards and functionality that fits exactly with what you need. Way more professional.
I'm sure Google Sheets are fine. But I've been seen truly ugly Google Sheets with way too many tabs and horizontal scrolling. Clunky cells that seem to expand and have their own scrolling universe with different laws to everything else. Why can't I simply click the cell to copy it all, nope, let's try double-clicking the cell, I just want to grab the contents to the clipboard, nope. Now it expands and I'm scrolling the whole sheet and have lost my place because Google Sheets tries to snap to rows or something. Damn I hate this memory of navigating someone's horrible Google sheet.