341–350 of 361 posts
and of course Google sheets with its synchronous use model is doing the same
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> 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…
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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.
Is your home server LAN only or have you configured it in some way to be accessible and secure on the internet? I'm interested in setting up a fileserver myself but I'm not sure what the latest is on security.
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Is your home server LAN only or have you configured it in some way to be accessible and secure on the internet? I'm interested in setting up a fileserver myself but I'm not sure what the latest is on security.
Tailscale is a great place to start. It uses a VPN to access your servers while outside of your LAN while avoiding the security risk of them being wide open to the internet.
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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.
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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.
To an accountant, excel spreadsheet is a source of truth. There is no undetermined behavior. They can look at the calculations underlying the spreadsheet and understand what is happening, no different than a developer looking at source code. They do in fact have their own forms of unit tests considering these data are audited in a far more rigorous fashion than most any code that ships with unit tests.
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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.
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Try out rowzero.io! It's a pure spreadsheet like Sheets/Excel, but with a much larger row limit.
Have any thoughts on how it compares to https://baserow.io/ ?
While powerful, this assumption also creates rigidity that a pure spreadsheet doesn't have. You can't, for example, do some quick scratchpad analysis off to the side of your data, or quickly subtotal a few rows with an adhoc formula. For that type of flexibility, you need a pure spreadsheet, which is the camp that Row Zero falls in (along with Excel & Sheets).
So, to answer your question - they're solving different problems. Some spreadsheet usage may be better served by a visual (or actual) database, which is why that sector has exploded in the last decade. But not all use-cases fit that criteria - the flexibility of the pure spreadsheet remains an incredibly powerful thing.