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

Show HN: Using Google Sheets as the back end/APIs of your app

zerosheets.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

151–160 of 171 posts

Re: Show HN: Using Google Sheets as the back end/APIs of your app

#151

Post by _sidewalkchalk_ »

yawnxyz wrote: post #109

I'm surprised no one's posted Spread API yet: https://spreadapi.roombelt.com/ It's a free Google Sheets / Apps Script you just paste to your sheet, and it turns the sheet into a full CRUD. It's kind of rate limited though but completely free! Edit: I've thought about creating a company around Sheets before, and the problem is that once you get to the "willing to pay" stage, you also kind of outgrow Sheets. I'd rather…

what are the Spread API rate limits? Wasn't able to find info about this on the site

Re: Show HN: Using Google Sheets as the back end/APIs of your app

#152

Post by [deleted] »

forgotmypwlol wrote: post #99
yangff wrote: post #97

You don't actaully need any fancy wrapping.. just open https://script.google.com/ you can already access all google's APIs + you will be able to integrate your sheets with your gmail (send email), calendar (you can modify the calendar when the sheet get changes), create pages, allow inputs from form and etc..) The problem with that is the sheet will not have any .. transaction based ops like a real database so for ex…

Every time someone makes a simple solution for a problem on this website someone else points out that a much more complicated option already exists.

[deleted]

Re: Show HN: Using Google Sheets as the back end/APIs of your app

#153

Post by michaelmior »

fendy3002 wrote: post #150
michaelmior wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> no revision control I'm not claiming this is a sufficient solution, but Google Sheets does keep a version history and you can see changes. Doesn't solve the problem of working copies and merging though.

Try to compare version histories on hundred thousands row of google sheet. It's not a pleasant experience.

Absolutely. I'm just mentioning it because sometimes I forget that it even exists and it is better than nothing at all.

Re: Show HN: Using Google Sheets as the back end/APIs of your app

#154

Post by Havoc »

seanhunter wrote: post #127

Just beware of the modern version of the "Excel noob trap" which lots of investment banks fell into in the 80s and 90s. Spreadsheets are amazing generic calculating frameworks and you can do a ton in them, so a lot of banks ended up building a huge ediface of excel spreadsheets that ran a wide variety of risk, pricing and operational functions. With a few plugins and extensions you can really do amazing things with t…

It's not always by choice. It took me around 4 hours of red tape at work to get into a place where I could run a policy compliant python hello world.

Not a full IDE or god forbid pip modules - just hello world. And that's one of the better experiences thus far. Some finance shops simple don't give you any options.

Its par for the course to give office workers access to only Excel and then people are surprised when they build abominations in excel...

Re: Show HN: Using Google Sheets as the back end/APIs of your app

#157

Post by fendy3002 »

gremlinunderway wrote: post #144
Yiin wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you elaborate? I understand the reasoning "we need to grow no matter the cost, will deal with problems when they arise", but deliberately sabotaging yourself doesn't sound reasonable.

not op but probably because some people are so used to using spreadsheets that even if you built them a database with custom visualizations, they'd ask for spreadsheet export.

Not op but that's one of a milder example. Some management people prefer the look and feel administration to be excel-like, even able to do data modification like excel.

Some even worse that they require the data to be in excel since that's all they know.

Re: Show HN: Using Google Sheets as the back end/APIs of your app

#158

Post by eiiot »

neontomo wrote: post #155

I use Opensheet as the backend for storing reviews of my book. It's not CRUD, but easy enough to fetch data as JSON and display it on a website (and for free!). Highly recommended. https://github.com/benborgers/opensheet

x2, opensheet is one of those tools I use so often I forget how useful it is. It’s so nice to be able to take form responses (or just generic svg data) and display it to a user base without having to setup a SQLite database and APIs.

Re: Show HN: Using Google Sheets as the back end/APIs of your app

#159

Post by ziolko »

yawnxyz wrote: post #109

I'm surprised no one's posted Spread API yet: https://spreadapi.roombelt.com/ It's a free Google Sheets / Apps Script you just paste to your sheet, and it turns the sheet into a full CRUD. It's kind of rate limited though but completely free! Edit: I've thought about creating a company around Sheets before, and the problem is that once you get to the "willing to pay" stage, you also kind of outgrow Sheets. I'd rather…

So glad that people find my little project useful!

Please keep in mind that you can always post your improvement ideas or PR's here https://github.com/ziolko/spreadapi.

Re: Show HN: Using Google Sheets as the back end/APIs of your app

#160

Post by m12k »

seanhunter wrote: post #127

Just beware of the modern version of the "Excel noob trap" which lots of investment banks fell into in the 80s and 90s. Spreadsheets are amazing generic calculating frameworks and you can do a ton in them, so a lot of banks ended up building a huge ediface of excel spreadsheets that ran a wide variety of risk, pricing and operational functions. With a few plugins and extensions you can really do amazing things with t…

This is remarkably similar to the situation you get with visual scripting in game development - it's intended as a way for designers and artists to do small coding tasks on their own without needing to bother a programmer (e.g. set up a pressure plate that opens a door when you step on it), but their creations also tend to spiral out of control. There's a whole website dedicated to examples of this from Unreal Engine[1]

Personally, I think good refactoring support would be the way to go - make it easier for a programmer to go in and "extract method" or similar to clean things up if they have gotten out of hand, without necessarily having to rewrite the whole thing from scratch.

[1] https://blueprintsfromhell.tumblr.com/

Post reply on HN