I only use Google Sheets
mayberay.bearblog.dev219 points by mugamuga 10 hours ago
219 points by mugamuga 10 hours ago
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 money; that would have taken 2-4 hours if they’d just used a spreadsheet”.
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.
>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.
> 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.)
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.
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.
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.
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.
>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"
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...
That's every company I've ever worked for, whether they have 100 employees or 300,000.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Are any of them as easy to use as a spreadsheet?
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
> 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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
Having worked on Lotus Notes, I am acutely aware that groupware wasn't the answer either.
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!)
Wasn't Microsoft Access basically that? There's also Google's AppSheet, which may be that too.
>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.
>>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
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.
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.
Have you tried Airtable? It works like a spreadsheet but is a database underneath.
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..
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.
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
> I wish there was a better way to make spreadsheets use a database as a backend.
Here you go: https://visualdb.com/
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).
> 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/
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.
>> especially so for people who can't code
Minor point, but I would say that people who can construct formulas, are indeed coding.
> especially so for people who can't code.
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.
That's not true, you can use Airtable to get the ease of use of a spreadsheet with the robustness of a database.
And now you have two problems. It’s not just SQL that you have to learn, but airtable. Which probably isn’t installed anywhere.
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.
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.
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.
Telling everyone to learn Python to solve all of their problems is not a legitimate or realistic suggestion or solution.
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.
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.
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.
>>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.
I agree spreadsheets are amazing, but they are not databases. Much grief has been caused by trying to make them be one.
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.
Have you not heard of spreadsheet-database hybrids? Like Airtable? Or if you want to use Postgres: https://visualdb.com
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.
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.
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
> 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.
Data > Protect sheets and ranges, choose Protect range or Protect sheet, and then click Set permissions to customize who can edit them.
What Problem?
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
When was last time you used Onedrive or Sharepoint connected Excel? That's also how it works nowadays.
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!
And not to forget, you can run Doom and Tetris in them.
In both GS and XL, actually.
Excel used to have its own video game as an Easter egg.
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.
> 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.
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.
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
> 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.
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!
Also backups in two separate legalizations if the hosting company is not in the same country as you or your company.
I'm still heartbroken about Grooveshark all these years later.
I still have my copy of [SciLor's Grooveshark.com Downloader][1] for posterity's sake :)
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.
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
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.
Any good tools for automatic backup of these things? How would a non-tech-type do it?
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.
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.
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
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.
If you give a shit about music you should not use Spotify at all, but that is probably a different discussion
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
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.
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?
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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
I just use any scripting language, mostly Typst, because then I have the analysis directly in the document
Microsoft Word and Microsoft Excel?
.xlsx is the key. Can use it with sheets, M$ or libre office. Or unzip it and take a look at XML.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
>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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Why would a government division (or any 20-person office) pay a reseller?
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.
> 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.
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)
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.
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!
try being banned by msft. I am still banned for 6 years without doing anything wrong. still lost access to all of my accounts.
A good reason why no one should ever have their Windows install linked to a Microsoft account, same for MacOS.
Who ever lost apple account by being banned? with no recourse? I don't remember a story like that
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.
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.
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.
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.
Google takeout is key. Why struggle backing up individual Google things.
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:
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.
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.
> 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.
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
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.
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.
> 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...
"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.
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.
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.
Agreed. That is my point. If that company had built the app from the start it would have died building it.
If you can do something badly and you can do something the right way in the same amount of time, why do it wrong?
“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.
> Start with a gsheet, when it breaks build something else.
Absolutely don't. The one who built the spreadsheet will have changed companies and the "business logic" and the knowledge will be gone with them. You're now stuck with a blackbox that no ones knows the specs of but everybody depends on.
How is that different than an engineer building out a service implementing material business logic then leaving for another job?
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.
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.
> 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.
> 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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
> 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.
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.
Or Google Apps Script! You can get a long way with some simple scripts to import data, etc.
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-...
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)
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)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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"
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.
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.
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)
> 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.
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?
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.
Mary Shaw discusses spreadsheets as an example of vernacular programming in a paper I read: https://dl.acm.org/doi/abs/10.1145/3480947
I sure hope the author also uses Google Takeout regularly.
This reminds me of this idea of "Minium Viable Airtable" that I think is apt:
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.
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).
Try out rowzero.io! It's a pure spreadsheet like Sheets/Excel, but with a much larger row limit.
The web version of Apple Numbers is pretty good although I suppose it doesn't meet your non-big-tech criteria.
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.
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.
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.
LLMs making Google Sheet webapps expediently is killer feature.
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.
2015: This meeting could have been an email 2025: This enterprise development project could have been a spreadsheet
Built entire businesses on Google Sheets and Apps Script. Powerful combo.
Well, did you suggest it to your boss? how did it go? bad organization is a two way resposability, except in the army.
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"?
I am amazed how many people just upload everything to Google without a second thought
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
I note that this blog isn't a Google Sheet.
You're right, though it definitely fits into the ethos of don't overcomplicate things.
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
It’s amazing to me how well Fred Brooks’ insights from 50 years ago hold up (plan to throw one away, in this case).
You shouldn't use anything by Google.
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.
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?
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.
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.
See also: Do the simplest thing that could possibly work
https://www.seangoedecke.com/the-simplest-thing-that-could-p...
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.
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.
> "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.
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!
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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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Do you work for local government? I’ve heard of cities using Excel for this but not Sheets (although I’m not surprised).