My new discovered superpower for Google sheet is using Gemini, not the integrated functionality, but using Gemini to spit out some very specific use case into app script which I plug into my sheet. Majority of the time the code works without any issue on first try with Gemini Pro.
I only use Google Sheets
301–310 of 361 posts
Re: I only use Google Sheets
#302Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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…
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…
> Everything runs on the server, including triggers
I think that’s a consequence of the fact that multiple users can simultaneously edit a sheet. Yes, Google could special-case the “you are the single user of this sheet” case, but that’s extra work, and, I think, would be fairly complicated when handling edge cases where users frequently start and stop editing a sheet.
Re: I only use Google Sheets
#303for when not to use a spreadsheet, see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34968457 tl;dr when it involves automated processes
Re: I only use Google Sheets
#304I was the internal tools PM that looked at the portfolio of products and asked, "Why aren't all of these just Google Sheets?"
Pivoted out of there lol
Re: I only use Google Sheets
#305Always 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…
I agree. However, so many of my use cases include a one-to-many relationship that I was outgrowing excel/sheets too quickly. Once a project added a VLOOKUP, it hit an inflection point in complexity. I spun up a local Grist instance in my org, using SAML with our org's email authentication. It's intuitive enough that I've replaced a few shared spreadsheets with it (now with rowwise permissions) and powerful enough tha…
While Grist is a brilliant product, I really dislike the spreadsheet marketing they use.
It's not in any way a spreadsheet, you can't use rows correctly and everything is stuck in columns. Not to mention the forms you use for input are not user friendly compared to a simple understandable coloured cell
Re: I only use Google Sheets
#306Always 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?
Discoverability is a big one. People really underestimate the value of having a menu, an actual fucking menu, listing all the functions you can use. Typing and getting autocomplete is a poor substitute, and you don't get even that in SQL, Python, or R by default - there are products that can provide that for you, but only after an expert has set them up.
Re: I only use Google Sheets
#307I was the internal tools PM that looked at the portfolio of products and asked, "Why aren't all of these just Google Sheets?" Pivoted out of there lol
It’s embarrassing. Back when Zillow was trying to be a real estate broker, they had a pipeline for salespeople to track the progress of flipped houses. I was brought in with oh maybe 50 other devs to code the more extensible replacement.
The existing workflow was all down in google sheets, and it scaled to at least 10 states. There were growing pains, sure, but it seems like a monumental waste to spend an hundred years of dev effort replacing an existing working system that cost the price of a Google enterprise installation.
Re: I only use Google Sheets
#308One 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 can't tell whether I'm being super paranoid but I've been burned by Google so many times on product sunsets that I've just removed all of my data from them. I managed to set up private self-hosted versions of an email client, photo viewing app, and barebones alternative to Docs and Sheets. Switched from Google to Kagi, and Chrome to Brave, but generally keep my own bookmarks of sites to use rather than using search…
Sheets is the one thing I haven't found a good self-hosted alternative to.
I tried Nextcloud a couple of years ago but found it really buggy and slow. Even the basic notes editor on Android was absolutely terrible. Absolutely no comparison to what I'm using now, Obsidian with Syncthing.
Can anyone recommend a good sheets alternative other than Nextcloud?
Re: I only use Google Sheets
#309Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm working on De-Googling. I now have a Mac and an iPhone instead of Windows/Android, but switching from Drive to iCloud seems a fairly parallel move. I also set up my first home server with RAID NAS. It's on my list to spin up an OpenOffice container or something I can use to replace Google Sheets. That will let me delete my Drive data; next is Google Photos and eventually Gmail.
It took about a week for me to completely de-Google from scratch. Drive was easy enough to download everything off, but the real pain in the arse was Google Photos. I had something like 250 individual 2GB zip files and the supplementary metadata was separated off of the image files themselves. I had to put together some Python scripts to clean up all the different file naming formats over the years (PIXL_YYYYMMDD, IM…
Perhaps google takeout would have been easier?
Re: I only use Google Sheets
#310Earlier quoted context omitted.
I can't tell whether I'm being super paranoid but I've been burned by Google so many times on product sunsets that I've just removed all of my data from them. I managed to set up private self-hosted versions of an email client, photo viewing app, and barebones alternative to Docs and Sheets. Switched from Google to Kagi, and Chrome to Brave, but generally keep my own bookmarks of sites to use rather than using search…
What’s your Docs and Sheets alternative? I’ve looked, I’ve never found anything that seems to both cover all the bases and not feel like a bad Microsoft clone.
Obsidian with Syncthing works great for me over Docs.
Haven't found a good self-hosted Sheets alternative yet.