>"I entered the workforce about 9 months ago"
This sentence made me feel like I was reading a young Gen-Z kid's tech complaint at a small company.
I only use Google Sheets
271–280 of 361 posts
Re: I only use Google Sheets
#272Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.…
I was part of a team helping a Fortune 500 company whose inventory system was basically a master spreadsheet that maybe 8 people in the company actually had write access to. Everyone reported numbers up to them and the spreadsheet had read only views for purchase order projections. 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 ho…
Found the GAP employee.
And if you aren't this story could have come from one.
Re: I only use Google Sheets
#273Absolutely agree with OP. One thing I would add is, sometimes when you need some extra complexity that's too difficult to express or build in Google Sheets, one step above it is Google Colab (or any other Jupyter notebook). Before building a full blown app, I always ask myself: 1. can this just be a spreadsheet? If not, 2. can this just be a Jupyter notebook? And yes, the integration between Sheets and Colab is great…
how do you upgrade some existing "thing" from a google sheet to a colab notebook?
I know of the gspread package for python... but I can't see how that gives you anything but the raw data from the sheet. any graphs and interaction (!) and such you would have to redo in jupyter.
Re: I only use Google Sheets
#274Reminds me of "Ask HN: Is the world run by badly updated Excel sheets?" [0] You need experience to see the shorcomings of spreadsheets. No version control. No tests. In general it's good for things that don't need to evolve, but stay the same (most likely because they're short lived). [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33611431 [EDIT] An example of a comment from that thread pointing in this direction: > In gen…
> 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.
You can also just put the spreadsheet into a git repo. Done. Version control.
Re: I only use Google Sheets
#275Earlier quoted context omitted.
Who ever lost apple account by being banned? with no recourse? I don't remember a story like that
I've never heard a rant about people being banned, but i can think of a half dozen people who have lost their icloud accounts due to the combo of inexplicably not remembering or writing down their passwords and selling or losing a phone.
That's the opposite than ban by Apple. And also for this people can go to an apple store or call support right? unless they enable the most nuclear e2e option.
Re: I only use Google Sheets
#276Earlier quoted context omitted.
I was part of a team helping a Fortune 500 company whose inventory system was basically a master spreadsheet that maybe 8 people in the company actually had write access to. Everyone reported numbers up to them and the spreadsheet had read only views for purchase order projections. 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 ho…
Found the GAP employee. And if you aren't this story could have come from one.
Not GAP, not even clothing, but still retail.
Re: I only use Google Sheets
#277"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.
If the sky doesn't fall the sky doesn't fall. Buddy of mine in sales is using some old DOS software from the 90s to control inventory and quotes. I bet there are absolutely zero people who know how it works in that company today. But, it works.
Turns out when you make relatively simple software, it doesn't really need maintenance. How often do you need to maintain a function like f(x)= mx + b? If it works it works.
Re: I only use Google Sheets
#278That’s what I thought almost thirty years ago: That MS Access is the solution to all problems in an office environment. I‘d model the domain and create a full working app with database backend in days.
And five years later I consulted companies who had business critical solutions built in MS Access that were not scaling anymore (concurrent users, faster database etc)
Applied to this article: Yes, you can use Google Sheets for all sorts of tasks, but eventually you will need to move on to a more robust solution.
Re: I only use Google Sheets
#279Absolutely agree with OP. One thing I would add is, sometimes when you need some extra complexity that's too difficult to express or build in Google Sheets, one step above it is Google Colab (or any other Jupyter notebook). Before building a full blown app, I always ask myself: 1. can this just be a spreadsheet? If not, 2. can this just be a Jupyter notebook? And yes, the integration between Sheets and Colab is great…
IMO Jupyter notebook is a big step up in complexity from just writing a python script. You can put block comments in python script just fine. "let me spin up a local web server to view my comments and run my code in serial in an object oriented fashion" no thanks from me.
Re: I only use Google Sheets
#280Earlier quoted context omitted.
How is that different from losing access to, say, your own computer by the same route? That's entirely different from another entity denying you access to your data.
People have investments in things like itunes, apps, etc.
are you trying to say if you forget your password it is the same as you getting blocked for no reason?