311–320 of 361 posts
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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.
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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…
Access was pretty amazing on its own back in its day, ignoring its multi-user limitations. It glued together a relational database, visual query builder, GUI/Form Builder, and reporting. You could create forms with sub forms that linked tables together. Also had a datasheet view. All of this without touching VBA code, but VBA was there when you needed it.
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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. 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…
Access's database is fairly limited and prone to corruption, especially using in a (local) network setup. The better solution would be to have real backend database and use ODBC to sync in data to Excel and Access. Maybe back in 1995 it made more sense but that's before my time. Access was pretty amazing on its own back in its day, ignoring its multi-user limitations. It glued together a relational database, visual q…
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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.…
My big gripe with spreadsheets is just that there's a lot of bloat on top of the spreadsheet which makes large datasets difficult to work with. Otherwise, I find them to be great deliverables.
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Telling everyone to learn Python to solve all of their problems is not a legitimate or realistic suggestion or solution.
Why? We expect huge swaths of non-programmers to learn R to work with data. Seems like it just depends on the field. If Excel was an integrated Python environment (or VBA or whatever pick your language) then I bet users would have learned it all the same. Twenty years later I bet HN would be full of complaints about how people have a hard time transitioning to "real" Python because they learned the Excel flavor.
I’ve worked in academics and industry around biologists, chemists, physicists, statisticians, bioinformaticians, and all varieties of engineers.
I’ve never seen “huge swaths” of anyone expected to learn R for anything outside of a few niche areas in statistics and bioinformatics.
What people are expected to know is how to use a spreadsheet. What people are often given is Microsoft Excel, and essentially nothing else. A lot of companies wouldn’t dream of letting random employees install or use R or Python.
It’s not ideal. But some battles can’t be won and aren’t worth fighting. Which is why people use Excel for so many things.
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. 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…
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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.
What about a tool that tracks updates to shared Excel spreadsheet and replicate them in a SQL database? And then, if somebody makes a change in the database, a trigger will update the spreadsheet Such a two-way binding makes it possible to continue relying on spreadsheets for UX, all the while the data is not locked in there and we can also have other processes handling the data (a web app, some cron job, etc) Maybe…
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How do I get it out of their cloud? It works as a backup to my phone, but I'd still want another copy that I can access regardless of whether I've got access to that phone number right now. Sorting that out with the carrier can take a while What's (to me) much more exciting to me is the incremental local backups they're working on. I've iirc looked into how to decode these big backup files, and copy them off my phone…
I assume the process is basically to restore from cloud on device and then export a local backup. But I don't recall them saying anything specific about that. The incremental backups do sound really nice.
Even if it works for desktop clients also, that still needs to be set up using a data matrix scanned by the mobile device (or if that's already done before you lost the origin device, you can "simply" extract the faux-encrypted sqlite format that the desktop client uses, albeit with having to recompile this encryption extension for Sqlite manually — ask me how I know..)
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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
Wait what, how does (did?) that work?
And more importantly (I can find the opus files myself): can/could it retrieve my account data to know which songs to download?
I've been able to partially reconstruct my music from localStorage, downloaded songs on my phone (yay for having root and access to that data folder), and memory, but it's still incomplete
Fwiw, here's my own little contribution to getting song data from Grooveshark, in my first blog post: https://lgms.nl/blog-1 (not my first blog site though). Happy to meet other fans :D
"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.