Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

I only use Google Sheets

mayberay.bearblog.dev

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

321–330 of 361 posts

Re: I only use Google Sheets

#321

Post by Aachen »

zelphirkalt wrote: post #284
raybb wrote: post #240

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Perhaps there's a market for this. An automated or semi-automated backup of many cloud services. It could probably be as simple as doing a gdpr request in some cases.

That's not necessarily simple though, because some companies are shady and ass about it. And then if you want to pursue the matter, be ready to face significant effort needed to file a proper complaint in the correct channels for that.

Fwiw, GDPR has a forgotten clause that data exports need to also be provided in machine-readable format for easy service migrations and promoting competition / reducing vendor lock-in

The only reason I can imagine why nobody implements this, is that they like the status quo where it's hard to switch to their service, but equally hard to switch away. Once this becomes commonplace (e.g. because vendor A makes users aware it's a thing by implementing it for migrating from vendor B), vendor B will "retaliate" and A will have to truly be better than vendor B to retain said users

That is all to say, this might yet totally be a viable and legally unblockable business avenue for a third party to initiate. I'm just not sure there's enough demand to warrant (read: pay for) the effort involved. Maybe if you can have an LLM read the api docs of the service where you want to do the import and autogenerate a mostly-working version?

Re: I only use Google Sheets

#322

Post by mglazebrook »

I get the appeal — Sheets is insanely flexible and quick to hack together workflows. I’ve seen entire businesses basically run on it. The tradeoff I’ve noticed is that as client work scales, you start spending more time managing the sheet than the actual work. Curious — do you use it mainly for tracking, or are you also handling things like scheduling/invoicing inside Sheets too? I’ve always wondered where the tipping point is between ‘this is efficient’ vs ‘this is duct tape holding everything together’

Re: I only use Google Sheets

#324

Post by wanderingmind »

foxylad wrote: post #316
hannofcart wrote: post #92

Earlier 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…

Or use the API to program in anything you want. We use Google Sheets for our accounting system, loading data via bank APIs and a cron-driven python script. We used to use Xero, but it couldn't handle the different tax regimes we operate in.

That looks like a great usecase. Would you be able to write about the architecture. A lot of us would love to be able to do things like this in Sheets, I'm personally trying to integrate a forecast estimate into Sheets

Re: I only use Google Sheets

#325

Post by xnx »

compiler-guy wrote: post #110
dotancohen wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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?

It is far easier to work your way into programming via spreadsheets than via sql. One day you are writing ‘sum(a2:a201)’ the next you do some conditional formatting and so the complexity builds up very slowly with your needs. With sql, day one: ‘SELECT SUM(Column) AS Total FROM Table;‘ Way more complicated. Way more powerful too, but most people don’t need the power until much later. And you have to work in the conso…

Google Sheets has the =QUERY() function which does some very limited SQL.

Re: I only use Google Sheets

#327

Post by skirmish »

jmkd wrote: post #41

Xoogler here. For my five years we only used Sheets (called Trix internally) for everything from project management, CRM, quarterly planning, reporting, interviewing, finances and so on. This was not because it was a Google product (we used plenty of competitors' products) but because it is so easy to make them good enough for the task that you can move on to getting the job done instead of administrating getting the…

I can say that even now lots of machine learning datasets are kept as rows in gSheets and processed by Python running in Colab. In our team, all our evaluations: read input data from gSheet, run model inference, store outputs in gSheet for manual review if needed, process outputs to compute metrics and plot graphs in Colab. It is great because evaluation logic frequently changes, and without Colab you would sit and wait days each time for code reviews and stupid readability approvals.

And then, of course, if you want reproducibility, you just check in Colab notebooks into the source control.

Re: I only use Google Sheets

#328

Post by Pooge »

wewtyflakes wrote: post #230
Pooge wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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?

A spreadsheet doesn't scale, is easily lost or corrupted or stolen, doesn't have security and people that tend to use it don't add data validation and don't care about atomic properties or data consistency.

Re: I only use Google Sheets

#329

Post by Pooge »

asdff wrote: post #277
Pooge wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

The question is not whether it works or not. It's that it becomes the bottleneck of your infrastructure.

Those users are accustomed to doing their work in a spreadsheet so it makes it harder to automate the process.

Spreadsheets are amazing tools, but they must not be used as the source of truth.

Re: I only use Google Sheets

#330

Post by jeroenhd »

asdff wrote: post #274
jeroenhd wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

You can't track who changed what rows that way. Excel has native support for that.

If all you want is to see previous versions, just make the files read-only after saving them and increment a number in the file name every time you change something.

Post reply on HN