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I only use Google Sheets

mayberay.bearblog.dev

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Re: I only use Google Sheets

#221

Post by dkarl »

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…

I agree. It's extremely hard to learn to use someone else's spreadsheet unless they're sitting right there with you watching you fumble through it.

I have a couple of spreadsheets that I use on a weekly basis, and I found it easiest to build both of them from scratch, despite the tons of examples floating around for exactly my use cases, and despite it being my first time building anything with a spreadsheet in 10+ years.

On the bright side, after using these spreadsheets for a week, I lost all desire to write apps to do the same things. Google Sheets is a good-enough UI and solves sync across different computers and mobile.

Re: I only use Google Sheets

#222

Post by supportengineer »

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

Minor point, but I would say that people who can construct formulas, are indeed coding.

Re: I only use Google Sheets

#223

Post by supportengineer »

thesuitonym wrote: post #100
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.

That's every company I've ever worked for, whether they have 100 employees or 300,000.

Re: I only use Google Sheets

#226

Post by DonHopkins »

IAmBroom wrote: post #131
cousin_it wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I spent some time with Apps Script a few weeks ago. It has some strange design decisions: 1) Everything runs on the server, including triggers and even custom functions! This means every script call requires a roundtrip, every cell using a custom function requires a roundtrip on each change, and it feels much slower than the rest of the UI. 2) You can't put a change trigger on a cell or subset of cells, only on the w…

> 2) You can't put a change trigger on a cell or subset of cells, only on the whole sheet. So you have to manually check which cell the trigger happened on. This is true of MS Excel's scripting language (VBA) as well. Worksheets are objects with events; cells are objects without (VBA-accessible) events. It may be an issue with scaling and efficiency.

But Google Sheets remote procedure calls are vastly slower than local OLE/COM dispatching. (And VBA/Excel presumably uses the optimized tighter COM interface binding instead of the slower high level COM IDispatch. Sure there's some overhead but it's nothing compared to Google Sheet's network overhead.)

Not only is scripting Google Sheets indeterminently and syrupy slow, it also imposes an arbitrary limit on how long your code can run, making a lot of applications not just inefficient but impossible. Running your code in google's cloud doesn't make spreadsheet api calls any faster, it just limits how long you can run, them BAM!

To get anything non-trivial done, you have to use getSheetValues and ranges to read and write big batches of values as 2d arrays.

https://developers.google.com/apps-script/reference/spreadsh...

It's easier to just download the entire spreadsheet csv or layers and bang on that from whatever language you want, instead of trying to use google hosted spreadsheet scripts.

Re: I only use Google Sheets

#227

Post by Moeancurly »

hughes wrote: post #216
Aachen wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I'm still heartbroken about Grooveshark all these years later.

I still have my copy of [SciLor's Grooveshark.com Downloader][1] for posterity's sake :)

[1]: http://www.scilor.com/grooveshark-downloader.html

Re: I only use Google Sheets

#228

Post by dkarl »

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?

Because they don't know it's programming. Seriously. I dated a woman for five years who was an accountant and a spreadsheet wizard. I told her that doing what she did with Excel, she was just as much a programmer as me, and she flat-out refused to believe that she had the mental capabilities required to be a programmer.

Years after we broke up, a new company she joined required her to take a VBA training course, and she texted me and told me I was right, VBA was easy and her biggest challenge was being patient while the other students struggled.

Re: I only use Google Sheets

#230

Post by wewtyflakes »

Pooge wrote: post #166
mixcocam wrote: post #24

"Programmers waste enormous amounts of time thinking about, or worrying about, the speed of noncritical parts of their programs, and these attempts at efficiency actually have a strong negative impact when debugging and maintenance are considered. We should forget about small efficiencies, say about 97% of the time: premature optimization is the root of all evil. Yet we should not pass up our opportunities in that cr…

> Start with a gsheet, when it breaks build something else. Absolutely don't. The one who built the spreadsheet will have changed companies and the "business logic" and the knowledge will be gone with them. You're now stuck with a blackbox that no ones knows the specs of but everybody depends on.

How is that different than an engineer building out a service implementing material business logic then leaving for another job?
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