Google Docs gets an API for task automation • Hacker News Board

Re: Google Docs gets an API for task automation

#91

Post by webreac » Mon, Feb 11, 2019, 10:07 PM UTC

northwest65 wrote: post #79

irrational wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>they got bored with it I've always wondered why Google is so bad at keeping various services going. Your comment caused me to reflect that Google hires a lot of smart people. Smart people tend to get bored with working on the same thing and want to work on new shiny things. Could it be that the smart people at Google do a bang up job of creating new services, but then get bored and move on to something new, leaving…

>I've always wondered why Google is so bad at keeping various services going I'm starting to believe that it might be simply because low quality software is hard to maintain. They have some very complex software, but nothing of great quality. They might hire a lot of smart people, but not very many that are actually good at developing quality software. It appears that being smart doesn't make you diligent in your wor…

Google's software is "free". If it was too good, it would kill competition. Google has one fear: to be cut in pieces because of monopolistic behaviour. Google, Gmail, Google map and google translate have almost killed concurrency. Google doc is improving.

Re: Google Docs gets an API for task automation

#92

Post by seanwilson » Mon, Feb 11, 2019, 10:16 PM UTC

Which parts are completely new that you couldn't do before? Haven't they had APIs for years that let you pull data out of documents and edit them as well? Or Google Docs specifically was lacking here?

Re: Google Docs gets an API for task automation

#93

Post by treis » Mon, Feb 11, 2019, 10:17 PM UTC

northwest65 wrote: post #79

irrational wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>they got bored with it I've always wondered why Google is so bad at keeping various services going. Your comment caused me to reflect that Google hires a lot of smart people. Smart people tend to get bored with working on the same thing and want to work on new shiny things. Could it be that the smart people at Google do a bang up job of creating new services, but then get bored and move on to something new, leaving…

>I've always wondered why Google is so bad at keeping various services going I'm starting to believe that it might be simply because low quality software is hard to maintain. They have some very complex software, but nothing of great quality. They might hire a lot of smart people, but not very many that are actually good at developing quality software. It appears that being smart doesn't make you diligent in your wor…

To add to this, they can't even properly display screen saver photos on Chromecast from Google photos. My 4:3 photos get the top and bottom cut off instead of being letterboxed.

Re: Google Docs gets an API for task automation

#94

Post by he6s4vyu » Mon, Feb 11, 2019, 10:17 PM UTC

stronglikedan wrote: post #87

he6s4vyu wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Given that the mods can alter the rank of a post artificially, and do so probably often, this statement holds no weight.

It holds more weight than your baseless accusations, but please refrain from posting inflammatory comments that do nothing to further the conversation.

Adding weight to a story: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11662380

Removing weight from a story: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16485753

Please refrain from posting inflammatory comments that do nothing to further the conversation.

Re: Google Docs gets an API for task automation

#95

Post by anitil » Mon, Feb 11, 2019, 10:21 PM UTC

cosmie wrote: post #47

legitster wrote: post #21

They will have a lot of catchup to do to get where Office is now. I'm frankly amazed by how good Microsoft Flow has been. So many dumb business processes rely on an Excel doc somewhere, or a stupid manual email somewhere else. But with Flow I've seen just a single smarty-pants able to fully streamline an entire department one rule at a time. They don't need to get permission to bring in a new logo - it's part of Offi…

Hahahaha. I stumbled upon Flow last year when I switched jobs. Our IT/procurement process is ridiculous, so I scrounged around our intranet resources for licenses and tools that I had access to by default or could get/request access to without triggering the Eye of Sauron to gaze down upon me from the tower of IT Security. My team does analytics consulting work for large multi-agency marketing campaigns, and I used F…

That is such great work. Getting the job done with the tools already around is just such a good feeling.

Re: Google Docs gets an API for task automation

#96

Post by leesalminen » Mon, Feb 11, 2019, 10:24 PM UTC

seanwilson wrote: post #90

leesalminen wrote: post #2

One cool thing I did with the Google Drive API was pull in our app's release notes from Google Drive. This allows our product and support teams to write/edit release notes and have it "magically" appear in-app as HTML. The workflow is: 1.) Employee creates a GDoc in a known, shared folder 2.) Application pulls all GDocs from this shared folder 3.) Application uses GDrive API to convert the GDoc to HTML 4.) HTML is di…

Do you have to worry about abuse of the API key used to pull in the doc or this isn't an issue (e.g. API call cost or going over a quota)?

We do 2 things:

1- the API keys are only used on our servers and not the device, so no new worries about the key getting out and abused

2- we cache the results of the API calls for 5-10 minutes with Redis. So there's no worries about the quota or rate limits.

We've been doing this for about a year with 15,000 daily active users. When we publish a new release note roughly half read it within the first 24 hours. No issues to report.

Re: Google Docs gets an API for task automation

#97

Post by zapov » Mon, Feb 11, 2019, 10:25 PM UTC

I’m glad to see that binding data with document templates is slowly becoming used more often. I always saw it as a killer feature, and actually built one of my products around that idea way in 2011 [1].

Once you leave the simple use cases of just replacing tags it gets quite complicated, but you can build really complex documents that way [2].

  [1] http://templater.info
  [2] https://github.com/ngs-doo/templaterexamples

Re: Google Docs gets an API for task automation

#98

Post by stronglikedan » Mon, Feb 11, 2019, 10:34 PM UTC

he6s4vyu wrote: post #94

stronglikedan wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It holds more weight than your baseless accusations, but please refrain from posting inflammatory comments that do nothing to further the conversation.

Adding weight to a story: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11662380 Removing weight from a story: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16485753 Please refrain from posting inflammatory comments that do nothing to further the conversation.

You may want to read those links you posted, since this story does not fall into those well-defined categories. Telling people their statements hold no weight based on false accusations is definitely inflammatory. Me simply pointing that out is certainly not inflammatory. If you follow the HN rules of etiquette, then we can have a productive conversation. If not, then good day to you.

Re: Google Docs gets an API for task automation

#99

Post by DoubleCribble » Mon, Feb 11, 2019, 10:47 PM UTC

tptacek wrote: post #37

I was pretty psyched about this, but it looks like you can't control table styles with it? Styled tables are a pretty big part of how you end up controlling formatting in GDocs, so I don't think I can build this into our workflow without that.

It definitely exists within the Apps Script functionality. [0]

[0] https://developers.google.com/apps-script/reference/document...

Re: Google Docs gets an API for task automation

#100

Post by cosmie » Mon, Feb 11, 2019, 10:52 PM UTC

viksit wrote: post #72

cosmie wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hahahaha. I stumbled upon Flow last year when I switched jobs. Our IT/procurement process is ridiculous, so I scrounged around our intranet resources for licenses and tools that I had access to by default or could get/request access to without triggering the Eye of Sauron to gaze down upon me from the tower of IT Security. My team does analytics consulting work for large multi-agency marketing campaigns, and I used F…

I hope you got recognition for this work!

Thank you! It has certainly been met with recognition, to the point where I'm essentially having to become a people manager again and create a team to support the capability across more clients.