[HN Gopher] I only use Google Sheets
___________________________________________________________________
I only use Google Sheets
Author : mugamuga
Score : 292 points
Date : 2025-10-01 08:06 UTC (14 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (mayberay.bearblog.dev)
(TXT) w3m dump (mayberay.bearblog.dev)
| glimshe wrote:
| And it all started with Visicalc. The spreadsheet and the word
| processor are the most important computer programs ever created.
| No wonder Google and Microsoft still make billions from these
| two.
| salviati wrote:
| I would argue that the compiler is the most important computer
| program.
|
| Or maybe that it doesn't make that much sense to look for a
| most important program.
| failingforward wrote:
| s/programs/applications/
| SoftTalker wrote:
| Yep they were the original "killer apps" and still are. They
| are the reason that PCs gained traction in businesses in the
| 1980s. I helped my chemistry teacher in High School back then
| to use Visicalc on a TRS-80 as a gradebook. Almost anyone who
| has used a computer for work has used a spreadsheet for
| something, whether managing simple lists, or something much
| more complicated.
| salviati wrote:
| Reminds me of "Ask HN: Is the world run by badly updated Excel
| sheets?" [0]
|
| You need experience to see the shorcomings of spreadsheets. No
| version control. No tests. In general it's good for things that
| don't need to evolve, but stay the same (most likely because
| they're short lived).
|
| [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33611431
|
| [EDIT] An example of a comment from that thread pointing in this
| direction:
|
| > In general, you adapt to the excel owner's quirks, not vice
| versa. If you don't like it you should create an excel sheet of
| your own and copy/paste, which people also do.
|
| > I knew a project manager who's job seemed to be reconciling
| multiple versions of a spreadsheet with different authors.
| PanoptesYC wrote:
| I've mostly seen the problem manifest when information is
| spread across a multitude of spreadsheets all stored in
| different places. The people involved don't know which
| spreadsheets contain what information and which are supposed
| to. Sometimes they end up having conflicting data purely
| because they don't realise that someone else thinks the primary
| source is spreadsheet A while they're only making changes to
| spreadsheet B.
|
| Any flaws with Excel haven't been due to the actual program or
| data, but just how the files are managed within projects.
| Labyrinthian sharepoints, files being forgotten about on
| network storage, etc.
| Qem wrote:
| > Any flaws with Excel haven't been due to the actual program
| or data, but just how the files are managed within projects.
|
| Not sure of that. Examples:
|
| https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S01679.
| ..
|
| https://link.springer.com/article/10.1186/1471-2105-5-80
| jeroenhd wrote:
| > 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.
| bluGill wrote:
| The people who have "built a Rube Goldberg machine to run
| their business processes" should have used a database not a
| spreadsheet. Though they likely don't have enough training in
| database design and so if they had their result would be
| worse - but that is the fault of their lack of training. To
| be fair, database training is not something they should have
| in their position
| thewebguyd wrote:
| It's tricky because a lot of these spreadsheet "apps" are
| made when the business is young. Specifically non-tech
| companies who don't have IT departments let alone any
| developers. They hire an MSP, get office, and go to town in
| Excel.
|
| By the time they do get big enough to hire internal IT, the
| Rube Goldberg system is entrenched. Then by the time they
| get big enough again to need an internal dev team because
| off the shelf SaaS no longer cuts it, it's too late. It'd
| take too many dev resources too much time and money to fix
| the spreadsheets, design databases, and start popping out
| web apps.
|
| Plus the software development process is too rigid for how
| fast business requirements can change. The accounting
| department will just do it in Excel in an afternoon instead
| of being willing to wait 2+ weeks for the next sprint.
|
| So we end up at a place in big enterprises where only some
| things get successfully moved to something more robust but
| there just isn't enough resources (or will to allocate
| those resources) to tackle every spreadsheet, and so there
| are always key parts of the business that will forever run
| on Excel.
| asdff wrote:
| You can also just put the spreadsheet into a git repo. Done.
| Version control.
| Chilko wrote:
| That's not the only version control through - if you use
| Excel connected to Onedrive or Sharepoint (like most major
| orgs in my country), then you have version history built-in
| tracking every edit going back months.
| tclancy wrote:
| Well yes, starting as a coder in the 2000s in the US, I always
| thought of my job as turning tortured spreadsheets sitting on a
| Windows network drive that have to be constantly babied by an
| underappreciated office staffer into web apps. But I do
| recognize that a lot of businesses have been run on
| spreadsheets and run well. There's a scaling problem and when
| it hits, ideally you know and can move to an app, but perfect
| is the enemy of done.
| adrianbooth17 wrote:
| I use Google Sheets for all my finances, it's great.
|
| I have an Expense Tracker UI within Google Sheets that allows me
| to submit expenses to the main sheet (currently just over 5000
| rows of expenses over the last few years)
|
| I only just recently vibe coded a web UI tool that uses a Google
| Service Account to add expenses to this Google Sheet for me, and
| then created a Progressive Web App from that so I could do
| everything on my phone.
|
| In summary, Google Sheets is sometimes all you need instead of a
| database for very simple applications (and built for an audience
| of one)
| bdcravens wrote:
| I've done the same for a long time. I've tried so many purpose-
| built alternatives, and always come back to my solution. (Funny
| enough, Microsoft Money from 20+ years ago is closer to what
| I'd like than anything available today)
|
| Not to say there aren't features I wish I could easily have. I
| could of course build it, and I've "started" so many times, but
| after a few hours of the typical boilerplate code you have to
| deal with, I'd always give up and go back to my surefire
| solution.
|
| (This was before vibe coding, so I may take a stab at that)
| benterix wrote:
| 2000's: I use Excel for everything
|
| 2010's: I use Google Sheets for everything
|
| 2020's: I use Etherpad[0] for everything
|
| [0] Or any other alternative for that matter
| brazukadev wrote:
| Real 2020's: I use TikTok/Instagram/YouTube for everything
| mixcocam wrote:
| +1
| lomase wrote:
| I use LLMs for everything.
| dvh wrote:
| I haven't used Google sheets for maybe 2 years, didn't have the
| need, but week ago I needed to send customer a table that will be
| updated every couple of days. I was surprised how slow it is.
| Table has 40 lines and 8 columns, static text only, and it takes
| 12s until I can edit it. For what it is (adding sentence every 3
| day) it's ok but if I had to actually use it for myself on a
| daily basis it would drive me mad.
| _zoltan_ wrote:
| I use it daily and have never had this problem.
| maccard wrote:
| I run my household budgetting off google sheets - a clean load
| of 8 sheets, wth 20-200 rows and 20-50 columns including some
| simple cross-sheet formulas is fully loaded and interactive in
| less than 2 seconds. My work's sharepoint based Excel roadmap
| doc is 40 rows of 8 columns and takes about 15 seconds from
| clicking the link to actually being readable, for comparison.
| crazygringo wrote:
| It should be lightning fast for what you're describing.
|
| All I can guess is you have some browser extension interfering?
| Maybe one that is blocking certain calls Google uses and the
| sheet doesn't load until they time out?
|
| If you're running an adblocker or blocking trackers or anything
| like that, try disabling those to see if that makes a
| difference. Otherwise check the network tab of the dev console
| to see what seems to be slow.
| bdcravens wrote:
| Definitely something more going on, like some deeply nested
| functions.
| jeffbee wrote:
| I manage all the information for every parcel in my city in
| Google Sheets. It is > 29k rows x dozens of columns and it is
| instantly interactive when I visit the bookmarked URL.
| actuallyalys wrote:
| Do you work for local government? I've heard of cities using
| Excel for this but not Sheets (although I'm not surprised).
| sidrag22 wrote:
| ya there is no way this isn't some local issue for something
| that small to take 12 seconds. my last job i force updated
| sheets with thousands of rows every 5 mins and it would just
| be like a quick 1 second blink to totally clear and replace
| all those rows with fresh data.
| greymalik wrote:
| It's amazing to me how well Fred Brooks' insights from 50 years
| ago hold up (plan to throw one away, in this case).
| cjs_ac wrote:
| > To cut things short, always use the easiest solution to solve a
| particular problem and once that solution does not work for the
| business anymore reassess what the new requirements are and
| either try enhance the current solution or find an alternative
| that better solve the problem.
|
| When solving a problem, solve the problem you have, not the
| problem you think you might have in the future, or the problem
| you wish you had. Your solution will prove inadequate in the
| future, but you are unlikely to correctly predict in what way
| your solution will be inadequate.
| f1shy wrote:
| But: if it is not more work, you can solve your problem by
| solving a family of problems around your problem in the problem
| space, making the solution robust, as small changes in the
| problem definition can easily be catached by small changes in
| your solution.
|
| That should, with no extra work, solve future problems.
| nashashmi wrote:
| I think you are saying you should be structured well enough
| to change your system to solve future problems.
|
| Like do you really need a dashboard on day 1? Or reports on
| day 2? Sometimes you just need a log of data. And the columns
| can grow and shrink.
| chii wrote:
| > you are unlikely to correctly predict in what way your
| solution will be inadequate
|
| but you can choose a current solution that does not block nor
| inhibit a future solution. As they say, always keep your
| options open, and don't vendor lock-in yourself into a corner.
| t_mann wrote:
| > Your solution will prove inadequate in the future, but you
| are unlikely to correctly predict in what way your solution
| will be inadequate.
|
| One inadequacy could be complete dependency on a vendor who
| accidentally locks you out of all your services or starts
| scalping you with ever higher fees. That one is quite
| predictable here.
| paseante wrote:
| Well, did you suggest it to your boss? how did it go? bad
| organization is a two way resposability, except in the army.
| mft_ wrote:
| I've long argued that spreadsheets are essentially a structured
| programming tool for people that would never imagine they could
| or would program. And maybe even a gateway drug in a proportion
| of cases?
| ikaros02 wrote:
| Mary Shaw discusses spreadsheets as an example of vernacular
| programming in a paper I read:
| https://dl.acm.org/doi/abs/10.1145/3480947
| smj-edison wrote:
| Huh, this is a really fascinating article! I really like how
| she articulates common myths in software development.
| However, it feels like her remarks are more targeted at the
| academic CS community, because I think a lot of her critiques
| (such as lack of integration thinking) are already
| internalized by project leads of modern software systems.
| saulpw wrote:
| The problem is that spreadsheets are an _unstructured_
| programming tool. It 's like BASIC with all its GOTOs, index-
| only loops, etc vs C with proper functions and control
| structures. You can have a structured spreadsheet but it
| requires discipline that almost no person (and certainly no
| organization) has.
| TrackerFF wrote:
| One thing I've learned: Never ( _ever_ ) make yourself
| reliant/dependent on Google products. If you do get banned /
| locked out, it is the most AI-Kafkaesque process imaginable to
| regain access. And you could stay locked out for years.
|
| I use Google sheets myself from time to time, but I regularly do
| backups of the sheets I'm working on, or anything important I
| have access to. I've been in the hole before, for reasons I still
| do not understand, and it was one of the most frustrating
| "customer support" processes I've ever experienced, and it took
| years.
| PunchTornado wrote:
| try being banned by msft. I am still banned for 6 years without
| doing anything wrong. still lost access to all of my accounts.
| AJ007 wrote:
| A good reason why no one should ever have their Windows
| install linked to a Microsoft account, same for MacOS.
| throwaway290 wrote:
| Who ever lost apple account by being banned? with no
| recourse? I don't remember a story like that
| hn-ifs wrote:
| Can't of happened then if you don't remember a story like
| it...
| throwaway290 wrote:
| I asked a question) Did I miss a story like that?
| Spooky23 wrote:
| I've never heard a rant about people being banned, but i
| can think of a half dozen people who have lost their
| icloud accounts due to the combo of inexplicably not
| remembering or writing down their passwords and selling
| or losing a phone.
| IAmBroom wrote:
| How is that different from losing access to, say, your
| own computer by the same route?
|
| That's entirely different from another entity denying you
| access to your data.
| Spooky23 wrote:
| People have investments in things like itunes, apps, etc.
| throwaway290 wrote:
| are you trying to say if you forget your password it is
| the same as you getting blocked for no reason?
| throwaway290 wrote:
| That's the opposite than ban by Apple. And also for this
| people can go to an apple store or call support right?
| unless they enable the most nuclear e2e option.
| BoredPositron wrote:
| My dad got a Trojan and they took over his msft account to
| buy some Xbox cards. They banned him as well but he took them
| to small claims in the EU. As usual they didn't show up and
| he got a ruling to reinstate his account. Was under 100 bucks
| and he got his account back. If the account is really
| important I would do the same. There is a 90% chance they
| won't show.
| fsckboy wrote:
| just as a point of interest, in US small claims courts, the
| judge can award monetary damages, but cannot order somebody
| to do something (like turn your account on) i'm not sure if
| this varies by state.
| Aachen wrote:
| I keep telling people to make backups of "cloud" services ever
| since Grooveshark died from one day to the next
|
| Maybe Spotify won't be taken down overnight, but they can lock
| me out for various reasons such as misdetecting an IP address
| (Google wouldn't let me log in at all when they thought I was
| in Russia, when I was at 31C3 in Hamburg, Germany, a conference
| where they afaik use some temporary IP space -- I don't know
| what consequences that would have nowadays)
|
| Hacker News also: if there are things here you want to keep,
| store them yourself
|
| Facebook chats, Signal, etc.: download the data in a format you
| can decode if there's anything you want to keep. Make sure you
| can decode this Signal backup format if your phone dies
| raybb wrote:
| Yes and don't forget signal is rolling out free cloud backup
| for texts so it should be making the process of backups even
| easier for non techy users.
| Aachen wrote:
| 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 semi-regularly, but this being rsyncable will make
| the process much faster
| raybb wrote:
| 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.
| edoceo wrote:
| Any good tools for automatic backup of these things? How
| would a non-tech-type do it?
| flatcakes wrote:
| This probably doesn't qualify as a non-tech type answer,
| but I have a Synology NAS which includes a feature
| (CloudSync?) to automatically download Google Drive
| documents in docx, xlsx, etc. format.
| umeshunni wrote:
| Ooh - I have a Synology NAS and didn't realize it can
| convert files on sync.
|
| It's also ironic that we're considering docx etc as open
| formats these days.
| Aachen wrote:
| There's sadly no silver bullet, especially for non-techies.
| To me it's like buying vegan products where available: I
| can't trivially become vegan with no effort, but I can
| affect market forces by preferentially buying things that
| align with that ideal. People could at least apply this
| where possible and buy products where they're in control
| somehow
|
| For storage platforms like Dropbox or Onedrive, it can be
| as simple as ctrl+c'ing the data out of there every now and
| then
|
| For Spotify, you can do the GDPR export and check that you
| can open it somehow. Even if it's not super readable, you
| can figure that out (with a tech friend or LLM perhaps) if
| you turn out to ever need it
|
| For Signal, I've got no idea. The format is hard to work
| with for hardcore techies. They really really don't want
| you, ahem, attackers to get that data in the clear. (Two-
| sided coin). Make sure to turn on the backups, write down
| the passphrase, and take them off your phone every now and
| then, and hope there's a restore method when you need it
| raybb wrote:
| 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.
| zelphirkalt wrote:
| 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.
| portaouflop wrote:
| If you give a shit about music you should not use Spotify at
| all, but that is probably a different discussion
| Aachen wrote:
| It is, but I think most people would care to at least have
| the song list, even if they'd need to go out and buy the
| corresponding data if they stop using the streaming
| service, or manually enter it into another streaming
| service
| GuB-42 wrote:
| > I keep telling people to make backups of "cloud" services
|
| The usual rule when making backups is that you need 3 copies,
| one of them offsite. A cloud storage service counts as an
| offsite copy, but you still need two more, typically one on
| your computer and one in cold storage (ex: external hard
| drive).
|
| Treat cloud storage like you treat your hard drive, it can
| fail at any time. The failure modes are different: mechanical
| failure vs losing access to your account, but the end result
| is the same: the system is unreliable and you have to
| engineer around it.
| Aachen wrote:
| I think applying these traditional schemes to SaaS
| environments (now called cloud) can be misleading
|
| When people want off-site backups, the server owner can say
| they've already taken care of that. I'd say that having a
| copy under your own control is a separate checkbox we
| should include!
| skydhash wrote:
| Also backups in two separate legalizations if the hosting
| company is not in the same country as you or your company.
| Too wrote:
| Good advice. Though I'd say you can count the cloud storage
| as 2 copies. They typically replicate the data to three
| drives, that covers all the typical failure modes you'd
| normally get when running a drive yourself. Then with a
| simple click you can even get a replica in another region.
|
| The third backup being in a decoupled system on site is
| what you now count as your "offsite" backup. Having this
| last copy is non-negotiable, no matter how many 9s S3 claim
| to have.
| hughes wrote:
| I'm still heartbroken about Grooveshark all these years
| later.
| Moeancurly wrote:
| I still have my copy of [SciLor's Grooveshark.com
| Downloader][1] for posterity's sake :)
|
| [1]: http://www.scilor.com/grooveshark-downloader.html
| sjw987 wrote:
| I can't tell whether I'm being super paranoid but I've been
| burned by Google so many times on product sunsets that I've
| just removed all of my data from them.
|
| I managed to set up private self-hosted versions of an email
| client, photo viewing app, and barebones alternative to Docs
| and Sheets. Switched from Google to Kagi, and Chrome to Brave,
| but generally keep my own bookmarks of sites to use rather than
| using search engines.
|
| I still run a skeleton Pixel, but the storage is almost
| exclusively just a very limited range of apps I use. I managed
| to get Google One storage from about 700GB to about 700Mb over
| the course of the last month or so.
| coffeefirst wrote:
| What's your Docs and Sheets alternative?
|
| I've looked, I've never found anything that seems to both
| cover all the bases and not feel like a bad Microsoft clone.
| sjw987 wrote:
| I just developed a webapp for it. I only used Docs for
| personal reasons, so my own version is basically just a
| really stripped down rich text editor. A lot of things I
| just save to .txt files.
|
| It saves (both locally and to self-hosting) to JSON and,
| exports to PDF and HTML. And then I wrote a script to
| convert docx files over when I migrated from Google.
| trollbridge wrote:
| Microsoft Word and Microsoft Excel?
| lemonlearnings wrote:
| .xlsx is the key. Can use it with sheets, M$ or libre
| office. Or unzip it and take a look at XML.
| tcfhgj wrote:
| same problem?
| tcfhgj wrote:
| I just use any scripting language, mostly Typst, because
| then I have the analysis directly in the document
| wiether wrote:
| Through my kDrive subscription, I get access to their own
| instance of OnlyOffice
|
| It looks a bit dated like MS Office, but it does the job
| and since it used MS Office formats, I can edit the
| documents with Libre Office or other sofwares. And using
| the API, I can programatically access those files.
|
| https://www.infomaniak.com/en/ksuite/kdrive
|
| https://www.onlyoffice.com/
| floundy wrote:
| 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.
| sjw987 wrote:
| It took about a week for me to completely de-Google from
| scratch.
|
| Drive was easy enough to download everything off, but the
| real pain in the arse was Google Photos. I had something
| like 250 individual 2GB zip files and the supplementary
| metadata was separated off of the image files themselves. I
| had to put together some Python scripts to clean up all the
| different file naming formats over the years
| (PIXL_YYYYMMDD, IMG_YYYYMMDD) into just YYYYMMDDD, and
| reattach the metadata, and then check through that
| everything was safely downloaded before deleting the Google
| Photos.
|
| Google Photos had some weird caching issues where it kept
| showing images I'd deleted and emptied from the bin, which
| was a little concerning. They were only appearing on my
| phone and persisted multiple times after clearing the
| cache. I couldn't find them anywhere in the phones internal
| storage.
| asdff wrote:
| 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.
| t_mann wrote:
| Sounds like you're not using something like Nextcloud (which
| should cover all your bases it seems). Any particular reason,
| any experiences you want to share?
| sjw987 wrote:
| I just sort of wanted to learn how to build (rudimentary)
| versions of the same apps I've always used made by other
| companies/people, and like the idea of the data being as
| clean as possible. I'm a bit of a data purist, so I store
| all of my photos unedited, and keep all of my text
| documents as simple as possible (minimal formatting, data-
| heavy).
|
| I'm also wary of just moving from one product to another,
| with the hassle of transferring things over constantly,
| security breaches, product sunsetting and all of those
| sorts of things.
|
| I'll give Nextcloud a look out of curiosity.
| t_mann wrote:
| I'm on a similar page. I try to set things up so that as
| many things as possible are regular files in my folder
| structure, which I then sync across devices. In my
| experience those are the only files I can rely on being
| able to retrieve long-term. Eg I don't use a photo app at
| all, I just have a folder with sub-folders (where I copy
| them manually). I don't know (yet) how Nextcloud fits
| with that, but it has several features that look really
| interesting in general (eg video calls).
| asdff wrote:
| Why Brave over Firefox?
| lemonlearnings wrote:
| Google takeout is key. Why struggle backing up individual
| Google things.
| crazygringo wrote:
| I assume you're talking about the free consumer tier?
|
| Nothing like that should happen if you're paying for even an
| individual Workspace plan. You get a phone number for customer
| support, and it works.
|
| Google shuts down free accounts when it believes they're being
| used for fraud/spam. And because scammers and spammers create
| them at virtually zero cost, and will fake activity to build
| account credibility until using them for nefarious purposes,
| that does mean legitimate free accounts occasionally get
| caught.
|
| Regular backups are important no matter what though. Obviously
| Takeout exists, but there are lots of third-party automated
| backup solutions as well that will automatically convert Sheets
| files to .xlsx as part of the backup process. I use one that
| backs up nightly to my NAS.
| throwuxiytayq wrote:
| Plenty of reports of people getting locked out of their
| Workspace accounts. Google even occasionally burns developers
| they have deals and working relationships with.
|
| Just don't use any Google services. Not free, not paid (why
| would you send them money???!?!). Not for personal stuff, not
| for work projects. Not for throwaway data, not for important
| data.
| Spooky23 wrote:
| The Google rage on HN is immature.
|
| That's a feature of any SaaS. Adobe frequently shuts down
| ETLA customers due their own invoice processing failures. I
| can think of three significant government subdivisions that
| were unable to access _any_ M365 service for 1-10 days as a
| result of a reseller change.
|
| The real lesson here is that you need to understand the
| failure domains of the technology your business depends on.
| Your business is as good as the contracts you rely on.
| We're relatively good at preparing for IT failure, but not
| so much the other stuff. For small businesses, key revenue
| generation could be stopped by an employee doing something
| dumb with a corporate card.
| praestigiare wrote:
| The real lesson here is that almost all modern SaaS
| applications have massively under invested in customer
| support in order to appear more profitable or sustainable
| than they really are. One of the major factors behind LLM
| development is trying to solve this problem before the
| house of cards falls down. Companies were enticed by the
| recurring revenue of SaaS, but don't want to pay for the
| level of support required when you are responsible for
| all your customers data as well as their access to the
| service.
| aitchnyu wrote:
| Why would a government division (or any 20-person office)
| pay a reseller?
| crazygringo wrote:
| Because government purchases go through the procurement
| office which is using an authorized reseller under a
| larger government contract.
|
| Resellers handle a bunch of compliance paperwork
| necessary for the government, and are also contracted for
| migration and support needs.
| ajross wrote:
| > Plenty of reports of people getting locked out of their
| Workspace accounts
|
| None substantiating the "most AI-kafkaesque process
| imaginable to regain access" upthread though. I mean, I
| don't know what you're citing specifically, but yes,
| obviously: business relationships like everything else get
| tangled up sometimes. People's electricity gets shut off
| incorrectly, people's Doordash orders arrive with the wrong
| stuff, phone bills arrive without the promised discounts;
| everything sucks, kinda.
|
| But if you're paying the solution is to call your support
| contact and have them sort it out. And that works at Google
| the same way it does everywhere else.
| patrickscoleman wrote:
| The worst customer support experiences of my life have been
| from Google, both while using Google Fi personally and GCP
| while working at Replit in its early days. Thankfully I'm no
| longer using either of those products now.
| toast0 wrote:
| > Nothing like that should happen if you're paying for even
| an individual Workspace plan. You get a phone number for
| customer support, and it works.
|
| Last I was a workspace Admin, you had to login to get the
| phone number and the code to dial once you called.
|
| It certainly did get you to a human. Unfortunately, they were
| not empowered to actually help with any of the things I
| needed help with, even when it would just be filing a
| enhancement request with the product team (they just tell you
| to post in the unmonitored product forum)
|
| I've seen several believable tales of Kafkaesque billing
| issues leading to Workspace accounts being suspended. It took
| months to get them to do invoice billing.
| weberer wrote:
| >You get a phone number for customer support, and it works.
|
| I don't believe this after decades of past experience with
| them trying to find any human to contact. Have you seen the
| phone number yourself? Normally they just give you the
| runaround trying to navigate a maze of support pages.
| crazygringo wrote:
| > _Have you seen the phone number yourself?_
|
| Yes. Do you have a paid account? It's in the Google Admin
| console. It gives you a PIN to enter when you call.
| CGMthrowaway wrote:
| You're right about google's track record but at heart yours is
| a comment about third-party cloud dependency, not google. As
| you mention, offline storage solves this and another commenter
| mentioned msft will ban you also (but you dont hear about it
| because...offline storage)
| bluGill wrote:
| Track record is a factor that you should consider.
|
| When companies buy services from others they often ensure
| that the contract has protection from things like this. They
| have clauses that the data belongs to them. They have clauses
| about what happens if the company is sold. They have clauses
| about abandoning the product. They have a number of other
| things added that I'm not aware of.
|
| You as a single individual (and often as a small business)
| don't have the power to get that into a contract. However you
| still should read the fine print - you should go elsewhere if
| it the fine print is against you.
| scythe wrote:
| This comment prompted me to go look at the various spreadsheet
| software available, since I was only familiar with the usual
| Excel / GS / Libre. There is also GNOME's Gnumeric, KDE's
| Calligra, Apple's Numbers, an online variant of LibreOffice
| called Collabora, an Excel clone made by a German company
| called PlanMaker, a Latvian effort called OnlyOffice, and then
| probably the most unusual variant, but somehow it isn't
| surprising that somebody made a spreadsheet based on Python:
|
| http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pyspread
| jd3 wrote:
| We bought a Google Workspace subscription for a building I help
| manage and I was shocked when I found out that you can't
| archive emails for discovery/legal purposes unless you buy a
| more expensive subscription that has access to the "vault."
|
| We already pay nearly $90/mo for 6 seats!
| hosteur wrote:
| Do you have a good automated way to back up Sheets, etc?
| brap wrote:
| Absolutely agree with OP.
|
| One thing I would add is, sometimes when you need some extra
| complexity that's too difficult to express or build in Google
| Sheets, one step above it is Google Colab (or any other Jupyter
| notebook).
|
| Before building a full blown app, I always ask myself: 1. can
| this just be a spreadsheet? If not, 2. can this just be a Jupyter
| notebook?
|
| And yes, the integration between Sheets and Colab is great.
| vlucas wrote:
| Or Google Apps Script! You can get a long way with some simple
| scripts to import data, etc.
| cracki wrote:
| how do you upgrade some existing "thing" from a google sheet to
| a colab notebook?
|
| I know of the gspread package for python... but I can't see how
| that gives you anything but the raw data from the sheet. any
| graphs and interaction (!) and such you would have to redo in
| jupyter.
| asdff wrote:
| IMO Jupyter notebook is a big step up in complexity from just
| writing a python script. You can put block comments in python
| script just fine. "let me spin up a local web server to view my
| comments and run my code in serial in an object oriented
| fashion" no thanks from me.
| mixcocam wrote:
| "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 critical 3%."
|
| - Donald Knuth
|
| Start with a gsheet, when it breaks build something else.
| Cthulhu_ wrote:
| Anecdotal, my previous employer had a contract once for a gas
| storage / exchange, for years their whole business relied on an
| Excel sheet (basically tracking gas storage transactions from
| various customers). I don't remember why but they decided to
| migrate that to a proper application, I think it took a full
| development team two years to build in all.
|
| But it's likely that, as these things go, they added much more
| features and visualizations on top instead of just a like-for-
| like replacement.
|
| TL;DR that company was bootstrapped successfully on just a
| spreadsheet.
| mixcocam wrote:
| Agreed. That is my point. If that company had built the app
| from the start it would have died building it.
| Pooge wrote:
| > 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.
| wewtyflakes wrote:
| How is that different than an engineer building out a service
| implementing material business logic then leaving for another
| job?
| asdff wrote:
| 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.
| SaintRomuald wrote:
| If you can do something badly and you can do something the
| right way in the same amount of time, why do it wrong?
| mixcocam wrote:
| "Same amount of time", that's where you are wrong . Then
| again, I'm not the one saying Knuth know better than me,
| maybe not better than you though.
| mbesto wrote:
| True story - I know a guy who built an application using Excel
| for tracking toll charges for car rentals back in the early
| 2000's. Over time he built out a team and an application. Piece
| by piece he automated things, but he initially did everything
| by hand, tracked it in Excel and printed it in PDFs out to his
| customers for reconciliation.
|
| He sold the business for $400M. No outside capital, he was the
| only owner.
| codeulike wrote:
| I can't find who coined it but there's a saying along the lines
| of "a spreadsheet is the second best tool for any job"
| cainxinth wrote:
| See also: Do the simplest thing that could possibly work
|
| https://www.seangoedecke.com/the-simplest-thing-that-could-p...
| rsynnott wrote:
| I note that this blog isn't a Google Sheet.
| bdcravens wrote:
| You're right, though it definitely fits into the ethos of don't
| overcomplicate things.
|
| https://github.com/HermanMartinus/bearblog/
| douchescript wrote:
| Works as long as you don't have to ask "which Google sheet" if
| you just have one sheet for a particular problem you are not in a
| world of hurt.
| nashashmi wrote:
| This is what we did in Excel. Is Google Sheet better somehow? Or
| is that only what new age kids know since college has adopted
| google products?
| johannes1234321 wrote:
| It is "better" in the way that it is easier to share.
|
| Sharing Excel sheets and keeping them in sync is tedious. (Even
| with O365/OneDrive)
|
| This may also include sharing between your own devices.
| Loughla wrote:
| I love excel and use it daily in my bullshit admin job.
|
| But google sheets is so much easier if you have more than one
| person interacting with the data. It just works, easily, every
| time. Even with 365 or whatever for MS products, they're more
| cumbersome.
| bdcravens wrote:
| 48 years old, so definitely not a "new age kid"
|
| Sharing is the killer feature. Not that you can't share with
| Office 360 these days, but many of us were sharing Google
| Sheets years ago when the rest of the world was still sending
| Excel files as email attachments, and there hasn't been much
| reason to switch.
|
| Probably not used by many, but if you need to break out of
| basic functions, some may find working in Javascript preferable
| to VBA.
| hn-ifs wrote:
| I suppose the issue here is trusting Google with your personal
| and business data. Mining that information for targeting
| advertising aside, it's not unheard of Google locking people out
| of their accounts with no reasons or obvious recourse.
|
| I wonder what the best non-mega corp solution there is for this.
| Imustaskforhelp wrote:
| Cryptpad comes to my mind although I suppose it might lack some
| features of google sheets but it has a web interface.
|
| For a non web interface, things like libreoffice can be good
| too but I think that you are asking for a web version..
|
| I am not sure if libreoffice has a web version, it seems that
| they do but I can't find much information and I might recommend
| crytpad personally so.
| jmkd wrote:
| 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 job done.
| mixcocam wrote:
| I have heard that at google collaboration happens with: -
| making lists (google groups) - gsheets - basic real time chat
| with auto disappear
|
| Is that the case? I find that super interesting. No sexy Slack
| or Teams type of thing?
| jmkd wrote:
| That was the case from 2011-2016. I can't say with as much
| certainty now, but anecdotally, probably similar.
| B-Con wrote:
| Chat supports rooms with chat threads without autodisappear.
| Everyone is in various rooms for their local team, broader
| team, org, and cross functional stuff. The net effect is
| Slack-like.
|
| There's also the ticket system. Sheets are commonly used by
| various PMs and TPMs for high level tracking, but IC eng
| stick with the tickets.
|
| It works fine.
| niam wrote:
| I'll die on this hill.
|
| Google Sheets was phenomenal for prototyping apps and getting
| quick feedback from users back when I used it in 2015-2020. Back
| then they had this janky implementation of Mozilla Rhino
| underpinning their "Apps Script" engine and it still beat the
| pants off of anything else you could use for free.
|
| Certainly you can shoot your feet with the various spreadsheet-
| isms but if you're diligent about keeping raw data pure
| (preferably in a completely different sheet inaccessible to
| users) it does a bangup job of quickly shoving a UI in front of
| users and letting them realize what they want and iterate on it
| before calcifying it into a more rigid system.
| ebbi wrote:
| Exactly this. Worked for a startup that had dogmatic leaders on
| 'using the best tool' 'spreadsheets are bad' (a trope they just
| got from people, not having used it themselves). Ended up
| spending thousands on consultants to build reporting etc that
| ended up needing to be changed after 6 months because of
| business/personnel changes.
|
| Spreadsheets are the best tool to quickly spin up and make
| changes to data.
|
| I've always thought about a tool to make a 'front-end' version
| of spreadsheets that end users use, where the layout can be a
| bit more freeform (i.e. build reports and dashboards in
| spreadsheet, then 'select' these reports and paste them into a
| front end WYSIWYG tool).
| corry wrote:
| 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 that it's the most creative and powerful piece of
| software we have available, especially so for people who can't
| code.
|
| With that power and freedom comes downsides, sure; and we can
| debate the merits of it being online, or whether this or that
| vendor is preferable; but my deep appreciation for spreadsheets
| remains undiminished by these mere trifles.
|
| It's the best authoring tool we've ever devised.
|
| EDIT TO ADD: the only other thing that seems to 'rhyme' with
| spreadsheets in the same way is: HyperCard. Flexible workbench
| that let you stitch together applications, data, UX, etc. RIP
| HyperCard, may you be never forgotten.
| bluGill wrote:
| I wish there was a better way to make spreadsheets use a
| database as a backend. Most of what people do with a
| spreadsheet would be better done in a database - but a database
| needs a lot more training to use (if you don't have the
| training you will make something worse than spreadsheet with
| your database!)
| Cthulhu_ wrote:
| Wasn't Microsoft Access basically that? There's also Google's
| AppSheet, which may be that too.
| yomismoaqui wrote:
| Microsoft Access requires more training (tables, foreign
| keys...) and from experience most of the people using Excel
| managed to bend it to do what they wanted.
|
| The maintainability of the resulting systems was not great,
| but they did the job and worse is better I guess..
| IAmBroom wrote:
| Add in to that: programming VBA for Excel spreadsheets is
| extremely trivial; programming in VBA for Access is
| second worst only to programming in Visio, MS Office's
| awful drawing program.
| sroerick wrote:
| You know, I used Retool a lot, and it made me think that
| I'd actually really like a modern Microsoft Access.
|
| Kind of an open source Google Forms/ Access where you could
| deploy front ends very quickly and have it hit a DB
| breadwinner wrote:
| Here's a modern Microsoft Access: https://visualdb.com/
|
| Or try Airtable.
| jasode wrote:
| _> 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.
| jfengel wrote:
| It sounds as if Excel has grown to incorporate most
| database features.
|
| Does it have atomic transactions yet? That's the main
| thing keeping me using small databases like Access even
| when a mere spreadsheet would do otherwise.
| breadwinner wrote:
| Have you tried Airtable? It works like a spreadsheet but
| is a database underneath.
| fsckboy wrote:
| >> _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 worked or didn't? DDE and all those
| other projects were always pursuing this as a dream
| zevon wrote:
| I think it worked technically and I've seen a few Access-
| based solutions to problems faced by people/groups
| without any real access to development resources.
| However, these solutions pretty much always came from
| people with rather technical mindsets and I think many of
| them involved tinkering in the evening and on weekends.
| So, my assumption would be that the demise of Access was
| more about UI/UX, complexity, familiarity and the like
| than it was about functionality.
| breadwinner wrote:
| > _I wish there was a better way to make spreadsheets use a
| database as a backend._
|
| Here you go: https://visualdb.com/
| password4321 wrote:
| Years ago I used Excel (VBA) as a CRUD interface on a
| database with minimal validation, it didn't take too long.
|
| Pretty sure something fairly similar is built-in these days.
| Zigurd wrote:
| The Google suite of Apps was born multiuser. They perform
| better then Microsoft's apps when multiple people, even dozens
| of them, are bashing on a single shared document. Document
| sharing is more powerful than sharing a window or a desktop. It
| changes the way people work together.
| Romario77 wrote:
| yes, that's true. It also brings the issues related to that -
| it's easy to delete the whole org data, change things
| uncontrollably, corrupt the data, there entries in the tables
| are free-form (well, you have to do programming to make it
| more robust).
|
| it works fine initially, but for long term it's usually more
| productive to have custom software.
| conductr wrote:
| > it's usually more productive to have custom software.
|
| If you multiplied the custom software development effort
| and cost to the multitude of places and use cases people in
| an organization are using spreadsheets I think you'd
| quickly find that it's infeasible. And that's not even
| taking into account how much value the adhoc-ability of
| spreadsheets adds to the equation. Most spreadsheets can be
| completely refactored or thrown away in a rather trivial
| manner. The sprint nature of software development screens
| out most things that could be spreadsheets. I'll build it
| in an hour instead of waiting 2 weeks to get on the next
| sprint.
|
| The software development process is too rigid for rapidly
| changing business needs. Having to spec out requirements
| and such is often an unknown and something you're doing
| live in the moment when creating the spreadsheet itself.
| Zigurd wrote:
| Google Workspace apps all (?) have versioning.
| IAmBroom wrote:
| I would not have agreed readily with that statement until
| three years ago, when I actually started working in GS as
| part of my job. I couldn't have imagined how seemless and
| well-implemented collaborative editing had become IRL.
| dotancohen wrote:
| > 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?
| imgabe wrote:
| nothing makes it impossible, but they already have Excel
| installed on their computer and they learned how to use it.
| Depending on where they work they may not be able to install
| Python or R or a database.
| jeffbee wrote:
| SQL and to an extent R were both created under the assumption
| that most people were not inclined to learn to program the
| computer. They could be expected to speak English and
| understand relational algebra, but they couldn't be expected
| to learn an imperative programming language. The existence of
| SQL stands as proof that at least some people 50 years ago
| thought there were multiple classes of user.
| compiler-guy wrote:
| 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 console which is an unfamiliar ui
| for many.
|
| It's not impossible, but very high overhead in comparison.
| breadwinner wrote:
| That's not true, you can use Airtable to get the ease of
| use of a spreadsheet with the robustness of a database.
| compiler-guy wrote:
| And now you have two problems. It's not just SQL that you
| have to learn, but airtable. Which probably isn't
| installed anywhere.
| breadwinner wrote:
| Not true. You can't use SQL in Airtable even if you want
| to, it just doesn't support it. Also, Airtable is SaaS,
| you can't install it.
| compiler-guy wrote:
| s/install/somehow obtain access/
|
| Doesn't really change the point.
|
| As of this writing, there are twenty-two comments on this
| thread about airtable. All but four are either you or
| responding to you bringing it up.
|
| I think it's fair to say that whatever its advantages may
| be, it is relatively unknown, and therefore a higher-
| overhead entree into programming than straight up
| spreadsheets.
|
| Just learning about it or finding fit for purpose takes
| more time than diving into a spreadsheet. And as always
| the argument is not that spreadsheets are more powerful
| or better, but that they are much easier and more
| incremental to learn and start with.
| breadwinner wrote:
| You are absolutely right and it makes sense to start with
| a spreadsheet. As I said elsewhere, you have to reach a
| pain threshold in order to look for alternatives to
| Excel. And how soon you reach the pain threshold depends
| on how big your data is and how many users are trying to
| modify the same data at the same time.
| eirikbakke wrote:
| Spreadsheet formulas have a very simple grammar: expression =
| reference | exp1 op exp2 | function(exp1, ..., expN)
|
| That's it. It's the math notation from high school, plus cell
| references, which can be inserted by clicking a cell.
| mebizzle wrote:
| Telling everyone to learn Python to solve all of their
| problems is not a legitimate or realistic suggestion or
| solution.
| Spivak wrote:
| 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.
| dkarl wrote:
| Because they don't know it's programming. Seriously. I dated
| a woman for five years who was an accountant and a
| spreadsheet wizard. I told her that doing what she did with
| Excel, she was just as much a programmer as me, and she flat-
| out refused to believe that she had the mental capabilities
| required to be a programmer.
|
| Years after we broke up, a new company she joined required
| her to take a VBA training course, and she texted me and told
| me I was right, VBA was easy and her biggest challenge was
| being patient while the other students struggled.
| imgabe wrote:
| I agree spreadsheets are amazing, but they are _not_ databases.
| Much grief has been caused by trying to make them be one.
| breadwinner wrote:
| Have you not heard of spreadsheet-database hybrids? Like
| Airtable? Or if you want to use Postgres:
| https://visualdb.com
| bonoboTP wrote:
| The gap in conceptual complexity to switch to databases is
| just way too high for most people. One lets them accomplish
| the business goal, the other does not.
| hannofcart wrote:
| > 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 clasp push it to spreadsheet.
|
| Once you have the tool chain set up the DX is quite nice.
| cousin_it wrote:
| 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 whole sheet. So you have to manually check
| which cell the trigger happened on.
|
| 3) Reading and writing cell values is so slow (can be a
| second or more per read or write) that the semi-official
| guidance is to do all reads in a bunch, then all writes in a
| bunch. And it's still slow then.
|
| 4) A lot of functionality, like adding custom menus, silently
| doesn't work on mobile. If your client wants to use Sheets on
| mobile, get ready to use silly workarounds, like using
| checkboxes as buttons to trigger scripts and hoping the user
| doesn't delete them.
|
| Overall I got the feeling that Google never tried to "self
| host" any functionality of core Sheets using Apps Script. If
| they tried, it'd be much faster and more complete.
| IAmBroom wrote:
| > 2) You can't put a change trigger on a cell or subset of
| cells, only on the whole sheet. So you have to manually
| check which cell the trigger happened on.
|
| This is true of MS Excel's scripting language (VBA) as
| well. Worksheets are objects with events; cells are objects
| without (VBA-accessible) events.
|
| It may be an issue with scaling and efficiency.
| DonHopkins wrote:
| But Google Sheets remote procedure calls are vastly
| slower than local OLE/COM dispatching. (And VBA/Excel
| presumably uses the optimized tighter COM interface
| binding instead of the slower high level COM IDispatch.
| Sure there's some overhead but it's nothing compared to
| Google Sheet's network overhead.)
|
| Not only is scripting Google Sheets indeterminently and
| syrupy slow, it also imposes an arbitrary limit on how
| long your code can run, making a lot of applications not
| just inefficient but impossible. Running your code in
| google's cloud doesn't make spreadsheet api calls any
| faster, it just limits how long you can run, them BAM!
|
| To get anything non-trivial done, you have to use
| getSheetValues and ranges to read and write big batches
| of values as 2d arrays.
|
| https://developers.google.com/apps-
| script/reference/spreadsh...
|
| It's easier to just download the entire spreadsheet csv
| or layers and bang on that from whatever language you
| want, instead of trying to use google hosted spreadsheet
| scripts.
| jfengel wrote:
| Ah, thank you for that. I want to write an extremely basic
| transform on my spreadsheet, and Googling failed to turn up
| how one did that.
| ubermonkey wrote:
| I didn't realize it at the time, but I my first encounter with
| the "solves every problem with a spreadsheet" user type came
| very early in my career.
|
| I worked in a computer lab in college, ca. 1989. One of my
| colleagues was in the mechanical engineering program, and had a
| bias generally for "solve the problem" over "elegant solution"
| or "appropriate tool" concerns. (I love the guy to this day, to
| be clear.)
|
| When he first came to work at the lab, he was the only guy to
| have installed FORTRAN on his workstation. It didn't work well.
|
| Then he discovered Lotus 1-2-3 and its macro language. He
| DELIGHTED in making the rest of horrified by creating all sorts
| of boundary-pushing utilities in Lotus macros. To be clear, he
| was at least 50% "doing a bit", and leaning into the "engineer
| only knows one tool" gag we'd all been riffing on. But he was
| still doing absurd stuff in Lotus that would've been better
| built in, say, Turbo Pascal or Turbo C.
|
| I had no idea back then that this pattern would become so
| prevalent.
| thesuitonym wrote:
| Another oft overlooked point is that anti-spreadsheet people
| aren't actually against using spreadsheets, we just want our
| coworkers to stop placing mission critical operations in an
| enormous, half-baked spreadsheet that exists only in some long-
| since retired users home directory.
| jader201 wrote:
| 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.
|
| It sounds like these anti-spreadsheet people need to find a
| new place to work and/or new coworkers.
|
| Either way people shouldn't be anti-spreadsheets because some
| people misuse them. That doesn't change the fact that they're
| a great tool for tracking/sharing/visualizing data.
| mebizzle wrote:
| This is anecdotal bias even now. The number of these
| monster spreadsheets running organizations that should be
| more sophisticated than they are would most likely keep
| anyone here up at night.
| abruzzi wrote:
| > 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.
|
| It happens all the time where I work. I don't want to be
| specific, but we have lots of examples here. In some cases
| people don't like the core software, so they work around it
| by tracking things on a spreadsheet. And sometimes that
| spreadsheet disappears (in one case, it was being kept on
| an XLSX on a USB thumb drive, but the thumb drive got
| corrupted and we lost some very important data.)
| jacobr1 wrote:
| The availability angle changes things quite a bit. Having
| a single source of truth online sheet is much different
| than a file that is passed around.
| jofer wrote:
| This depends a lot on what you do. Try working with a
| decision analyst sometime. The entire economic model with a
| decision tree and monte carlo analysis of cost overruns,
| etc for a multi-trillion dollar decision will literally be
| a arcanely-complex spreadsheet or two on someone's laptop.
|
| With that said, it's still a great tool for the job because
| the different stakeholders can inspect it.
| citizenpaul wrote:
| >I just don't see this in the real world these days
|
| Lol. Go to literally any bank. They all have a legion of
| accountant,analyists that's sole job is to maintain their
| little fiefdom of spreadsheets that only they understand.
|
| If most people knew just how held together by string,tape
| and gum the banking industry is there would be a run on the
| banks.
|
| There is also always some 75+yo part time guy that
| maintains some sort of critical system. He always says, "I
| want to retire but they keep throwing more money at me"
| zdragnar wrote:
| I was part of a team helping a Fortune 500 company whose
| inventory system was basically a master spreadsheet that
| maybe 8 people in the company actually had write access to.
| Everyone reported numbers up to them and the spreadsheet
| had read only views for purchase order projections.
|
| To say that it was a nightmare was an understatement. They
| were willing to dump vast sums of money to get something
| better, but they'd homebrewed so many human processes to
| deal with the spreadsheet that they struggled to adapt to a
| more conventional way of doing things.
| zer00eyz wrote:
| Found the GAP employee.
|
| And if you aren't this story could have come from one.
| zdragnar wrote:
| Not GAP, not even clothing, but still retail.
| Wojtkie wrote:
| 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.
| jamesnorden wrote:
| >but I just don't see this in the real world these days
|
| May be due to the fact you're a single datapoint and not
| omnipresent at every company. What a weird argument.
| RcouF1uZ4gsC wrote:
| As opposed to placing the mission critical operations in some
| huge enterprise Java deployment which has been touched by
| thousands of contractors, all of whom have only a very
| rudimentary understanding of the actual business logic.
|
| I think even a complicated spreadsheet that can be directly
| edited and modified by the actual business stakeholders is
| preferred.
| breadwinner wrote:
| > _even a complicated spreadsheet that can be directly
| edited and modified by the actual business stakeholders_
|
| You can do that in a spreadsheet-database hybrid such as
| Airtable.
| array_key_first wrote:
| The main problem is that a complex spreadsheet is just
| code. Its a bundle of logic and data. That's code.
|
| If the business stakeholders can edit said spreadsheet,
| they can code. Not well probably, but they can.
|
| So, theoretically, they should be able to open a python
| script or whatever and hack away. A lot of calculations are
| actually much easier and straightforward in a real language
| as opposed to Excel.
|
| But they won't, partially because developers would never
| let them.
| breadwinner wrote:
| You need to give them a tool that's as easy to use as a
| spreadsheet, and yet stores data in a relational database.
| There are plenty of spreadsheet-database hybrids in the
| market.
| gregates wrote:
| Are any of them as easy to use as a spreadsheet?
| breadwinner wrote:
| 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.
| pletnes wrote:
| I've used Airtable a bit. I think it's really cool and
| would like more people to use it. However, it's a lot
| more clicks and key presses to get things done -
| especially data entry - than in Excel. This also makes it
| better, since you can put constraints on tables, for
| instance.
| breadwinner wrote:
| You are absolutely right about needing more clicks and
| key strokes in Airtable. You have to reach the pain
| threshold in order to look for alternatives to Excel. And
| how soon you reach the pain threshold depends on how big
| your data is and how many users are trying to modify the
| same data at the same time.
|
| See here to understand what you are missing out by not
| using a database:
| https://visualdb.com/comparison/#integrity
| mstkllah wrote:
| I feel quite comfortable in Excel - used various tools
| like Power Pivot, Power Query, OLEDB, created my own
| functions, Python within Excel, etc. - but Airtable felt
| so confusing and limiting. Other former colleagues also
| struggled with Airtable; maybe it was not explained to us
| correctly.
| analog31 wrote:
| 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.
| breadwinner wrote:
| That's true, nothing is as ubiquitous as Excel. But Excel
| is not designed for multiple people simultaneously
| updating data. At some point you need a database.
| NotMichaelBay wrote:
| It's not perfect, but Excel can track changes by multiple
| users. Excel files shared on OneDrive/SharePoint allow
| multiple people to simultaneously update the data, and it
| tracks each individual change by each user.
| nextaccountic wrote:
| 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 market it as an API for excel or something
| gregates wrote:
| As someone who has been to multiple trade shows to show off
| our own spreadsheet product that solves some of these
| problems (https://rowzero.io/home), I can tell you there are
| a bunch of data engineers and their managers who have a
| visceral hatred of spreadsheets but have trouble articulating
| any reason for it.
| immibis wrote:
| Feels a bit like the no-code paradox though. When you make
| a sufficiently advanced no-code (or no-database) tool it
| becomes equivalent to code (or a database) and even though
| it does entice a novice to start using it, a complex system
| made in it is still complex code (or a complex database)
| and ends up requiring a competent programmer (or db admin)
| to maintain it, who wishes it was written the normal way to
| begin with.
| gregates wrote:
| I have no doubt that the stories of complex spreadsheet
| models as the beating heart of a business are true. But
| those models are likely the sole survivor from a thousand
| dead and gone spreadsheets that people extracted value
| from for a time, but just didn't have the ongoing utility
| or wide enough audience to merit being turned into a
| dashboard or web app. It would be a mistake to insist
| that all of those spreadsheets should have started life
| as something else, just in case maintenance should
| someday become necessary.
|
| In other words, one of the core use cases for a
| spreadsheet is that it empowers a broad swathe of users
| (broader than Tableau or PowerBI) to quickly extract
| insights from their data to fill immediate needs.
|
| Or at least, that's a core use case if you can get your
| data into a spreadsheet without too much trouble.
| bobson381 wrote:
| And then the attached part of this that you mentioned is
| that the cursed survivors have essentially outcompeted
| their peers for survival. They're winners of a genetic
| algorithm whose basis is company data. They have close
| contact with actual reality, and have been beaten
| carefully into shape by it. I have kind of a grudging
| respect for these because of that, actually.
| encloser wrote:
| > It would be a mistake to insist that all of those
| spreadsheets should have started life as something else,
| just in case maintenance should someday become necessary.
|
| The problem corporate IT/Dev folks face isn't that an
| idea started as a low-code tool, but rather that the low-
| code solution is often dumped on them with no budget or
| desire to improve it to be more reliable and
| maintainable.
|
| At least until something fails... and usually in dramatic
| fashion that then wakes leadership up to the idea that
| maybe we should invest more into this critical business
| process. If the company didn't go under in the meantime.
| rictic wrote:
| I love spreadsheets for casual stuff, but my concerns with
| using them for anything heavy duty are twofold: change
| management and correctness testing.
|
| Other software that I use and write is version controlled
| and has tests to catch errors, mistakes, typos. Those tests
| regularly find and prevent problems! Likewise version
| control.
|
| Could we get the same with spreadsheets? Seems difficult
| but not conceptually impossible, particularly with LLM
| assistance.
| giancarlostoro wrote:
| Imagine if people used Emacs the way they use Spreadsheets.
| "Hey I made a way to simplify our workflow, it has forms,
| buttons, gizmos we need" then you go to their desk, and its
| some custom Elisp abomination. I have to imagine this is
| how most people who hate spreadsheets see them. It still
| works, but it's a quirky solution.
|
| Also I remember Row Zero the demo on your home page was
| impressive. You guys were S3 engineers too, good to know
| your project took off. :)
| Terr_ wrote:
| > but have trouble articulating
|
| I imagine that's because it's not really a _technical_
| problem, but an issue with how the whole organization
| (mis)handles complexity, and we collectively [1] still
| struggle to model /name a lot of those problems.
|
| [1] Yeah yeah, I see you there in the back, you excited
| cyberneticist bubbling with enthusiasm to share... but I
| mean as a practical widespread matter.
| citizenpaul wrote:
| I've always suspected if someone were to make a spreadsheet
| app that solves most spreadsheet problems it would collapse
| most companies.
|
| As I see it the limitations of spreadsheets are what keep
| them from becoming the official way of doing things. At
| some point most of the stuff in the spreadsheets has data
| provenance in a properly managed IT system somewhere. If
| companies could get rid of this part of IT they would
| suddenly find themselves in a trillion dollar pit of lost
| money/inventory, As the spreadsheet mess spiraled out of
| control with no source of truth.
| goostavos wrote:
| One of the surprising things about working inside of
| $MegaCorp is that if you knock on enough doors, you'll
| eventually find that each org has, like, _one dude* with a
| spread sheet that powers everything else. Teams will get spun
| up to try to "automate" this spreadsheet, but, on a long
| enough time horizon, the spreadsheet wins._
| analog31 wrote:
| And it was probably created without approval.
| kayo_20211030 wrote:
| ... and been changed 3 times in the weeks it took to
| deliver the app.
| sokoloff wrote:
| Similar to the author's cases: I've sat through several
| presentations of small teams who worked for 6-10 weeks to
| create a web app that does _something_ (the details vary
| slightly from case to case) where at the end of the
| presentation, my first thought is "what a waste of effort
| and money; that would have taken 2-4 hours if they'd just
| used a spreadsheet".
| array_key_first wrote:
| This speaks more to the complexity of web and web
| development than as a pro of spreadsheets.
|
| You can create a super quick Python app with
| visualization and whatnot in about the same time as a
| spreadsheet. But then it's not online. And it's not best
| practice.
|
| Web is just a _fucking beast_ and then developers go in
| and add additional complexity.
|
| It would probably be a much simpler web app if you made
| it just, like, a bunch of PHP scripts thrown in a folder.
| But they won't do that.
| citizenpaul wrote:
| Excel, creating job security since 1997.
| supportengineer wrote:
| That's every company I've ever worked for, whether they have
| 100 employees or 300,000.
| emeril wrote:
| so true - as the spreadsheet "guru" at most of my employers -
| most of the issues with spreadsheets is misuse which is very
| common sadly
|
| though, much programming is poor and often can be
| accomplished better in a spreadsheet given the situation and
| use case...
| slightwinder wrote:
| > A spreadsheet gives you a DB
|
| They can emulate behaviour of databases; but the missing parts
| missing will haunt you. Spreadsheets are a jack of all trade,
| mastering nothing, haunting you with everything;.an amplifier
| for the Dunning-Kruger, where people are misguided about data-
| quality.
|
| Spreadsheets are indeed a great tool, but the implementations
| we have today are bad, with too many booby traps, not enough
| safeguards, not even much comfort for those with higher
| demands.
| thm wrote:
| And not to forget, you can run Doom and Tetris in them.
| IAmBroom wrote:
| In both GS and XL, actually.
|
| Excel used to have its own video game as an Easter egg.
| velcrovan wrote:
| > spreadsheet gives you a DB
|
| Yeah a DB where any user can accidentally hit the spacebar and
| erase a formula, and never see any warning that their outputs
| are now horribly inaccurate.
| piltdownman wrote:
| Data > Protect sheets and ranges, choose Protect range or
| Protect sheet, and then click Set permissions to customize
| who can edit them.
|
| What Problem?
| dahcryn wrote:
| and they save versions every edit or every few minutes too.
| It's free version control that you cannot forget to turn on
|
| Huge contrast with MS approach to this
| velcrovan wrote:
| MS approach is the same these days actually, people even
| complain about it.
| okanat wrote:
| When was last time you used Onedrive or Sharepoint
| connected Excel? That's also how it works nowadays.
| velcrovan wrote:
| I am anal about doing this at the range level, but few
| people are.
| Scubabear68 wrote:
| I would agree with you except the UI is so horrible.
|
| Give me a spreadsheet with a world cksss user interface and
| then you'll have something!
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| Spreadsheet _is_ the user interface.
|
| Also what you're looking for is called Microsoft Excel. Every
| one else is doing webshit UIs which can't be world-class by
| definition, because they hardly scale to real workloads :).
| Ajedi32 wrote:
| I've long wondered why there's not a more incremental
| transition path from spreadsheets to a full blown database with
| a custom UI. It just seems like spreadsheets are right on the
| cusp of being able to fill that that role but lack just a few
| key features which might make it viable (structured data,
| native SQL query support, custom UI elements, IDE integration,
| etc).
| breadwinner wrote:
| > _incremental transition path from spreadsheets to a full
| blown database_
|
| There are plenty of tools for that. Airtable comes to mind,
| or if you want to use your own database try:
| https://visualdb.com/
| 1-more wrote:
| At my old gig, all of our content generation was in Google
| sheets or Airtable.
|
| Anything we made would have _never_ been as good a UI and
| would have stopped us from being able to publish new
| content. The other nice thing about them is you can scale
| the integration effort. You can download a sheet from GS as
| a CSV then upload that in an admin page and you can
| probably ship that feature today. A tiny bit more effort
| and you can add a 3rd dimension to the data by finding an
| XSLX library and exporting the page as an Excel workbook.
| Eventually you can do something with their API where you
| just click "reload data from the master sheet" and you can
| generate all the data you need to preview the changes on
| the frontend. That's what our Airtable integration looked
| like. Airtable was very "pull this in via API" native and
| had a better way of expressing higher dimensional data in
| cells which matched nicely with Postgres storing arrays in
| cells.
| cassepipe wrote:
| Btw, anyone ever used Mathesar ? I saw it on the hn frontpage
| but I haven't tried it yet
| freehorse wrote:
| > It's the best authoring tool we've ever devised.
|
| It is also a very bad co-authoring tool imo unless you have a
| very tight team and processes of how to use spreadsheets. I
| would not mind if I was using it alone. But spreadsheets
| encourage a certain naive "visual" approach to structuring data
| in them that can become an issue if you want to import the data
| to actually process it somewhere and your coworkers don't
| really understand this well.
|
| Spreadsheets can be useful, however:
|
| 1. Speaking about excel in particular, localisation issues are
| an absolute nightmare if you happen to live in the wrong
| country (commas vs dots for decimal points) especially while
| importing CSV files (which is already unnecessarily complicated
| in excel). If somehow you don't notice these issues, you end up
| with wrong data without understanding there the error came
| from.
|
| 2. If your coworkers do not really understand very well how
| spreadsheets work, you quickly get to become really frustrated
| with issues coming up when you have to import a spreadsheet for
| actual processing. Datetimes with different forms, coloured
| boxes being meaningful, mixtures of text and numbers and
| whatnot.
|
| Yes a big part of it is "people problem" rather than
| "technology problem" but imo spreadsheet technology (excel,
| google sheets etc) encourages a variety of practices that make
| it less reliable. If the technology gives you the freedom to
| mess up too easily, imo it is not just a people problem.
| Zigurd wrote:
| Having worked on Lotus Notes, I am acutely aware that
| groupware wasn't the answer either.
| dkarl wrote:
| I agree. It's extremely hard to learn to use someone else's
| spreadsheet unless they're sitting right there with you
| watching you fumble through it.
|
| I have a couple of spreadsheets that I use on a weekly basis,
| and I found it easiest to build both of them from scratch,
| despite the tons of examples floating around for exactly my
| use cases, and despite it being my first time building
| anything with a spreadsheet in 10+ years.
|
| On the bright side, after using these spreadsheets for a
| week, I lost all desire to write apps to do the same things.
| Google Sheets is a good-enough UI and solves sync across
| different computers and mobile.
| oaktowner wrote:
| >>It's the best authoring tool we've ever devised.
|
| 100% agreed. Creating a spreadsheet is declarative programming,
| and Excel (and now Google Sheets) has made more developers than
| any other platform (probably by an order or two of magnitude).
|
| I do not know a business that was not CRITICALLY dependent on
| Excel for actual business operations through the 90s and
| 00s...and the same is likely true today.
| fsckboy wrote:
| i never loved nor hated hypercard. it was straightforward and
| clever but i really only used it for one thing: i made
| cardstock labels and liner notes for my audio cassette "rips"
| of albums (my 20mb hard disk (we didn't have MiBs then) wasn't
| going to hold many mp3's ;)
|
| i might have used it for burned CDs too, I can't remember. at
| work i had access to burning CDs at scale back then, I just
| don't remember when the blanks became cheap enough that nobody
| would notice my pilfering and and whether i still used my mac.
| i did burn disk backups to CDs
| CrulesAll wrote:
| Poe's law. If you use a spreadsheet as a DB for any sort of
| application, you should be tarred and feathered, and never
| infect any engineering team ever.
|
| Your 'trifles' are the biggest screw-ups from functionality to
| INFOSEC.
| bonoboTP wrote:
| MS Excel is much much much much more accessible to the normal
| office worker than MS Access. It's not even close. As a kid,
| most of us intuitively picked up Excel but Access was a
| mystery even with a teacher in computer class trying to teach
| us the basics. Later I learned SQL to create websites, and
| graduated with a good CS degree, but the learning curve is
| uncomparable.
| supportengineer wrote:
| >> especially so for people who can't code
|
| Minor point, but I would say that people who can construct
| formulas, are indeed coding.
| Schiphol wrote:
| > RIP HyperCard, may you be never forgotten.
|
| There's Decker https://beyondloom.com/decker/
| alexdoesstuff wrote:
| To expand on the overlooked point: it gives you a DB and a
| programming environment (however challenged) that you can use
| without needing sign-off from IT. In any moderately sizeable
| organization, getting approval to use anything but standard
| software is slow and painful.
|
| Nobody wants to explain to IT that they need to install Python
| on their machine, or drivers for sqlite, or - god forbid - get
| a proper database. Because that requires sign-off from several
| people, a proper justification, and so on.
| Lu2025 wrote:
| Right? Spreadsheets have such a low barrier of entry. I use
| Google Sheets in a middle of a farm field to enter plant
| growing records on my cell phone. I don't even have good
| reception at times so the sheets are in offline mode; they'll
| synch when I get back to the house. Crappy, crummy records are
| oftentimes better than no records. Farming is data-heavy and
| data-starved at the same. A learning cycle is a year, and one
| year is not like the other one.
| ChuckMcM wrote:
| Hard agree here. The value of combining database + UX + logic
| into a workbench is like the app we've been reinventing over
| and over again. It's why Visual Basic still lives :-).
|
| And yes, not the greatest way to proceed once you know what you
| want, but a heck of a way to iterate quickly and identify the
| actual requirements.
| hahajk wrote:
| I agree. However, so many of my use cases include a one-to-many
| relationship that I was outgrowing excel/sheets too quickly.
| Once a project added a VLOOKUP, it hit an inflection point in
| complexity.
|
| I spun up a local Grist instance in my org, using SAML with our
| org's email authentication. It's intuitive enough that I've
| replaced a few shared spreadsheets with it (now with rowwise
| permissions) and powerful enough that I've also replaced a few
| internal CRUD apps.
|
| https://github.com/gristlabs/grist-core
| cloudking wrote:
| Built entire businesses on Google Sheets and Apps Script.
| Powerful combo.
| sixhobbits wrote:
| Same, I currently have
|
| - My own rough business accounting (download all bank statements
| and do some pivots and graphing. Real accountants do the real
| thing, but I like to have a version that makes sense to me and
| that is up to date)
|
| - Personal accounting finance tracking for sharing expenses and
| tracking living costs over time
|
| - Consolidated asset tracking across different projects/accounts
| etc, just a quick summary that's not perfect but spending 10
| minutes a month manually updating it helps keep it in my head
| too.
|
| - A lot of project management (we also have real PM tools, but I
| keep my own sheets because it's easy and it makes sense to me)
|
| - A bunch of quick analytics (I also use metabase, but sometimes
| it's just faster to create a graph in sheets)
|
| Most of the time the sheet is not the _main_ tool I use, but it
| is the easiest and most useful one, while the others have better
| integrations, safety mechanisms (I often end up with +500 or
| whatever in a copy-paste formula error and sometimes don't catch
| it), and collaborative measures (if you have 2+ people editing
| the same sheet you're usually going to have a bad time)
| ksec wrote:
| Slightly Off Topic, are there any other online SpreadSheets other
| than Excel 365 and Google Sheets?
|
| Some of them are AirTable like which is CRM focus, but I just
| want a really simple spreadsheet that is easily accessible and
| not from Big Tech.
| actuallyalys wrote:
| I've mostly used LibreOffice for personal use and other cases
| where I don't want to use Big Tech, but you could try
| OnlyOffice. I've also been interested in Grist, which is more
| like AirTable but programmed in Python and (relevant to your
| request) self-hostable.
|
| Edit: Depending on your reasons for avoiding big tech, you may
| want to research the owner of Only Office, which was a Russian
| company but apparently isn't anymore? You might want to also
| try CryptPad, which is based off of OnlyOffice and recommended
| elsewhere in the comments (which reminded me).
| zenmac wrote:
| What's cool about CryptPad is all the data is encrypted
| behind the # tag key which never gets sent to server. So even
| the server admin don't have access to the user docs. It has
| being easy to migrate from server to server.
|
| A truly shining example to google doc alternative.
|
| It would be great to have some kind of syncthing <-> cryptpad
| drive, then it can be very nice alternative to even dropbox.
| Not sure what the development is ATM.
| criddell wrote:
| The web version of Apple Numbers is pretty good although I
| suppose it doesn't meet your non-big-tech criteria.
| ksec wrote:
| I actually dont have big tech problem, it is just most of the
| well knowns once are blocked in where I work, and now even
| Notion is blocked.
| blitt wrote:
| Try out rowzero.io! It's a pure spreadsheet like Sheets/Excel,
| but with a much larger row limit.
| ksec wrote:
| Thank You that looks fantastic! It feels snappy as well.
| raybb wrote:
| Have any thoughts on how it compares to https://baserow.io/ ?
| clamorbeclam wrote:
| Funny, I recently departed from the google ecosystem to proton,
| self hosted nextcloud, kagi, Libreoffice, and Apple Maps. Am I
| giving up some ease of use? Absolutely! Can I live with it?
| Absolutely! Can google go fuck itself? Hell yea. Libre office is
| like missing a limb, but with practice it can do anything I want
| it to.
| SoftTalker wrote:
| Google, Excel, Numbers, LibreOffice, close enough as makes no
| difference for what the vast majority of people do with
| spreadsheets. And even for more complex use cases, any of them
| will most likely be fine. Google probably has the edge if you
| need real-time sharing with multiple people.
| warkdarrior wrote:
| You have self-hosted Kagi? How?
| piqufoh wrote:
| > Doing the smallest and easiest solution to a problem as a way
| to get to know the full scope and then iterating after that if
| needs be is by far the best solution (for me).
|
| 100% -- this is YAGNI (or you-aint-gonna-need-it) and should be
| among the first things you think about when starting a new
| project.
| kkukshtel wrote:
| This reminds me of this idea of "Minium Viable Airtable" that I
| think is apt:
|
| https://sirupsen.com/minimum-viable-airtable
| sodapopcan wrote:
| You shouldn't use anything by Google.
| patrickscoleman wrote:
| Only tangentially on-topic, but I do all the financial modeling
| for the past several (early stage) startups I've worked for in
| Google Sheets.
|
| The ease, collaboration/sharing, and array formulas win out over
| the faster speed for calculations, better shortcuts, cross-
| workbook linking, and customization in Excel.
|
| That said, it's been a few years since I've tried Excel so would
| love to hear someone convince me to try it again.
| oaktowner wrote:
| I'm using the MS suite for the first time in over a
| decade...and the collaborative aspects are still nowhere near
| Google's. I routinely get problems when multiple people are
| editing the same content (Word doc, spreadsheet, or
| PowerPoint). And sometimes the thick client works best,
| sometimes browser editing works fine...but it's inconsistent.
|
| For all of them, Microsoft has a more complete feature
| set...but for 99% of things (and _anything_ with lots of
| collaboration), I prefer Google Work Suite or whatever it 's
| called this month.
| Mistletoe wrote:
| I'm about to leave Google Sheets because I keep very long
| spreadsheets about my life and everything I do and it refuses to
| open at anything but right at the top. So every time I have to
| scroll and scroll to get to the bottom. Does anyone have a fix
| for this? Last time I googled all I found was some dingleberry on
| a Google thread saying that's how spreadsheets should open. I
| moved to Google Sheets from Excel online that did that right at
| least. I moved away from Excel online because it has requirements
| for small file sizes and the images I would paste in the
| spreadsheet filled them up to the limit too fast.
| criddell wrote:
| Doesn't ctrl-end jump to the bottom row of the spreadsheet?
| Ctrl-down arrow will jump to the last cell in the current
| column. On a Mac it's cmd rather than ctrl I believe.
| Lumoscore wrote:
| I feel this deeply. I only use Google Sheets, too.
|
| It sounds crazy, but it's the best tool for so many random
| things, and here's why I stick with it:
|
| It Just Works: There's zero fuss. I don't need to install
| anything, I don't need to save it, and I don't need to worry
| about the format. It's always there, and it saves automatically.
|
| It's Simple to Share: If I need to show something to my spouse, a
| coworker, or anyone, I just send a link. No one needs to sign up
| or download some special app. Everyone can open it right away.
|
| It's the Perfect Checklist: For managing my own stuff--like a
| budget, a travel plan, or even just tracking a personal project--
| a sheet is faster than any fancy app. I can make columns that say
| "Done," "To Do," or "Waiting," and that's all I need.
|
| For most of my personal data and quick shared work, trying to use
| a dedicated software package is just overkill. Sheets is the
| easiest way to organize information in a clear, digital table.
| It's the ultimate low-tech solution to high-tech problems.
| aitchnyu wrote:
| Does Google Sheet allow fine grained filtering like "allow
| customers to see only their own requests" or "allow submissions
| to be edited within 1 hour"?
| kramer2718 wrote:
| 2015: This meeting could have been an email 2025: This enterprise
| development project could have been a spreadsheet
| sneak wrote:
| Reminder that anything you put into Google for storage is you
| voluntarily disclosing such information to the United States
| federal government without a warrant requirement.
|
| Due to both the third party doctrine as well as FAA702, the feds
| do not require warrants to access, copy, process, and store
| indefinitely all information you provide to Google.
|
| Good luck!
| dcminter wrote:
| > I entered the workforce about 9 months ago
|
| Right or wrong, it takes a certain amount of chutzpah to put
| forth such a definite opinion after less than a year in the
| workforce.
|
| What OP probably misses is the "there ain't nothing so permanent
| as a temporary solution" thing. I too embrace quick and dirty
| solutions but only if I have total control over the lifetime of
| that solution. If someone's going to ask me to deliver it
| immediately and then build a castle on top of it... I might
| insist on using a tool that has more up front cost.
| michaelteter wrote:
| I particularly enjoyed the "every couple of months..." bit. So,
| about four times?
| dcminter wrote:
| 'zactly :D I don't want to be too harsh though; I
| _definitely_ think the attitude of rolling out something
| simple that works is a solid approach when compared with the
| gold-plated second-system-syndrome thinking that 's terribly
| easy to fall into. They're not _wrong_ wrong, but there 's a
| bit more nuance to be had once you've seen the monsters that
| can grown out of a hasty prototype.
| kelnos wrote:
| Yeah, that line made me nearly laugh out loud.
|
| Not saying the author isn't onto something: using the simplest
| tool that will get your job done -- and bonus points if you can
| reasonably use the same tool for several things -- is a decent
| principle to live by. Using an _existing_ tool is great, when
| it meets your needs without too many difficult trade offs.
|
| And where they work, it seems like business requirements are
| scrapped and rewritten every couple months, so the whole
| "temporary-haha-yeah-right solution" problem doesn't really
| rear its head.
|
| The rest of us have to deal with the difficult mess several
| years down the line, because "we'll throw it away and write a
| new thing once we need to scale" is something that very rarely
| actually happens.
|
| Of course, the author has no experience of a year down the
| line, let alone several years down the line.
| bryanhogan wrote:
| This is honestly one of the things I really like about Notion
| Databases, at the core they are an online collaborative
| spreadsheet. But then it can also be given multiple views and
| different forms such as a calendar, Kanban board, timeline, image
| gallery, etc., wish more apps would allow something like this,
| e.g. Obsidian Bases are a great first step.
| EGreg wrote:
| Why not use an open source spreadsheet in javascript and html
| that you can host yourself?
|
| You can whip up whatever you want now with an LLM. And with JS it
| will save whatever you want in indexeddb or pouchdb and export to
| whatever formats like csv. Why lock into google?
| jwr wrote:
| The world is not binary, nor black & white. There is an entire
| spectrum of solutions between a spreadsheet and a highly-
| structured app. Sure, you can use a spreadsheet for anything,
| it's quick, and provides nearly no structure. You can also use a
| specialized application, tailored for the particular processes at
| hand, that does error checking on input, validates data
| integrity, and does not let you break data structures. And there
| is a whole spectrum in between.
|
| One thing to note is that a spreadsheet (OPs insistence on
| calling it "Google Sheet" is amusing after years of hearing
| people call it "excel", it's a spreadsheet, people!) is a poor-
| man's relational database, with most spreadsheets having a single
| table, or multiple tables but modeling no relations. And you
| can't model relations in a spreadsheet in any meaningful way
| (imposing constraints, checking integrity, etc).
|
| Written from the perspective of someone who makes a living
| providing a SaaS for (among others) inventory control, for which
| a spreadsheet is a direct competitor. Also, from the perspective
| of someone who has seen a _lot_ of customer spreadsheets with
| inventory, not one of them in any way correct or containing good
| data.
| maxglute wrote:
| LLMs making Google Sheet webapps expediently is killer feature.
| exodust wrote:
| > _" I spent 2 months designing and making an admin panel "_
|
| Why? It's easy and quick to code complicated things these days.
| It's nice having custom dashboards and functionality that fits
| exactly with what you need. Way more professional.
|
| I'm sure Google Sheets are fine. But I've been seen truly ugly
| Google Sheets with way too many tabs and horizontal scrolling.
| Clunky cells that seem to expand and have their own scrolling
| universe with different laws to everything else. Why can't I
| simply click the cell to copy it all, nope, let's try double-
| clicking the cell, I just want to grab the contents to the
| clipboard, nope. Now it expands and I'm scrolling the whole sheet
| and have lost my place because Google Sheets tries to snap to
| rows or something. Damn I hate this memory of navigating
| someone's horrible Google sheet.
| tcfhgj wrote:
| I am amazed how many people just upload everything to Google
| without a second thought
| supportengineer wrote:
| I sure hope the author also uses Google Takeout regularly.
| psadri wrote:
| I often wished for a Google Sheets like service that had an
| easier to use API and a bit more control over the schema. A cross
| between sheets and a headless CMS.
| mrbonner wrote:
| I used to work in a really big bank. One of our primary
| responsibility is to "convert" trade algorithm from spreadsheet
| to an actual production program/code. The usability of
| spreadsheet to show a concept quickly is great. But it is a
| nightmare to have to understand and debug during the conversion.
| Zaheer wrote:
| Related: How Levels.fyi scaled to millions of users with Google
| Sheets as a backend
|
| https://www.levels.fyi/blog/scaling-to-millions-with-google-...
| rcfox wrote:
| I worked on creating a card game with a couple of my friends. We
| kept all of the cards in a Google Sheet, allowing everyone to
| easily edit or create new cards. Then, I wrote a script to
| compile the sheet into a card atlas so that it could be consumed
| by Tabletop Simulator. It worked amazingly well.
|
| The only issue was that I had to run the script myself, since my
| friends were less technical. I'd probably see if I could setup a
| workflow in Github Actions to do it for me if I were to do this
| again.
| entropyie wrote:
| For those who hated the unmaintainable mega spreadsheet of death,
| MS Access was actually a quite decent solution. It allowed you to
| sprinkle some structure and maintainability onto a spreadsheet
| without losing the accessibility and ease of development. You
| could whip up really functional UIs without much coding
| knowledge. 20 years later and I still don't know what the
| replacement for Access is in today's world...
| zenlot wrote:
| I've recently removed the fancytooling out of my pipeline, and
| re-done Jira on LibreOffice's Calc.
|
| And with native python it has, I can query snapshots from Jira,
| add inputs etc.
|
| So much simpler, you open Calc's window and just hop faaaast
| through sheets. Rather than opening your browser, typing URL,
| entering Jira, getting into correct board etc.
|
| Need a to-do list? There too, just another sheet. Need to track
| your deployments? Just pull it into yet another sheet.
|
| The sheet is everything you really need.
| rhinoceraptor wrote:
| The HN perennial video, "You Suck at Excel" by Joel Spolsky [1]
| really changed my view on spreadsheets. I had never bothered to
| learn them enough to utilize naming or any of the features that
| make spreadsheets much more comprehensible. I was very happy to
| see Google Sheets added named tables recently, too.
|
| I've recently been experimenting in Apps Script to write my own
| (physical) book collection record system with a USB barcode
| scanner. So far I have nothing polished enough to show, but it is
| a very cool platform. I found it a bit frustrating that I
| couldn't just import NPM packages, but at the same time it's a
| good excuse to embrace simplicity and skip a library like Axios,
| and rely on its built-in fetch()-like API.
|
| 1: The original YouTube video has since been taken down, but you
| can still view it through the Wayback Machine:
|
| https://web.archive.org/web/20161118170705/https://www.youtu...
| Tepix wrote:
| I like what the author is writing. For the listed use cases,
| grist might be the better tool. It would also return control over
| your data back to you if you self-hist it (which is easy).
| system2 wrote:
| >"I entered the workforce about 9 months ago"
|
| This sentence made me feel like I was reading a young Gen-Z kid's
| tech complaint at a small company.
| submeta wrote:
| That's what I thought almost thirty years ago: That MS Access is
| the solution to all problems in an office environment. I'd model
| the domain and create a full working app with database backend in
| days.
|
| And five years later I consulted companies who had business
| critical solutions built in MS Access that were not scaling
| anymore (concurrent users, faster database etc)
|
| Applied to this article: Yes, you can use Google Sheets for all
| sorts of tasks, but eventually you will need to move on to a more
| robust solution.
| Gud wrote:
| I work for an American mega corporation that you've definitely
| heard of - my department relies heavily on a couple of spread
| sheets. They have survived 3 times of corporate buy out of my
| factory.
|
| The spreadsheets looked dated when I started working here, 7
| years ago.
|
| 2 years ago, my latest manager tried to move the department off
| these spread sheets to the corporation wide system. Another
| corporate wide system is set to replace the system we still
| aren't using by the end of 2026.
|
| I suspect we'll still rely on our spread sheets in 2027.
| tqwhite wrote:
| using spreadsheet to prototype thing == good idea
| busymom0 wrote:
| I coach people for powerlifting and create their programs in
| Google Sheets. I even have functions setup for converting a given
| weight to their plate breakdowns (for example 455lb squat would
| be broken down as: bar, 4x45lb plates, 1x25lb plate). My athletes
| can enter their current one rep maxes and the sheet auto updates
| the numbers for each training session. They can record notes
| about how each set went, how many reps they got etc. and then I
| can review them. It's all super convenient.
| LudwigNagasena wrote:
| One of the biggest problems in business automation is the gaps
| between such low-effort "shadow" IT, low code platforms, and
| fully fledged out "proper" projects. The gap between "let's make
| a google form" and "let's build a react app with proper design,
| ci/cd, testing, cdn and so on" is too wide. There should be a
| bunch of intermediate steps there with a sensible migration path,
| but there are none, there are only walled garden alternatives
| that aren't compatible with either.
| FinnKuhn wrote:
| I would argue the intermediate step are SAAS solutions such as
| ERP or CRM systems. Most of them offer sensible export options
| as well.
| invisblecitizen wrote:
| This. I'm a huge fan sheets and built a bookmarking extension on
| it because it's free, portable, private, etc etc.
| https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/quotebook/mcbjgbahg...
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