I Only Use Google Sheets
Posted3 months agoActive3 months ago
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The author shares their preference for using Google Sheets for various tasks, sparking a discussion on the pros and cons of using spreadsheets as a primary tool.
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Or maybe that it doesn't make that much sense to look for a most important program.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
If all you want is to see previous versions, just make the files read-only after saving them and increment a number in the file name every time you change something.
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)
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)
2010's: I use Google Sheets for everything
2020's: I use Etherpad[0] for everything
[0] Or any other alternative for that matter
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.
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.
That should, with no extra work, 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.
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 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.
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.
That's entirely different from another entity denying you access to your data.
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
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
Even if it works for desktop clients also, that still needs to be set up using a data matrix scanned by the mobile device (or if that's already done before you lost the origin device, you can "simply" extract the faux-encrypted sqlite format that the desktop client uses, albeit with having to recompile this encryption extension for Sqlite manually — ask me how I know..)
It's also ironic that we're considering docx etc as open formats these days.
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
The only reason I can imagine why nobody implements this, is that they like the status quo where it's hard to switch to their service, but equally hard to switch away. Once this becomes commonplace (e.g. because vendor A makes users aware it's a thing by implementing it for migrating from vendor B), vendor B will "retaliate" and A will have to truly be better than vendor B to retain said users
That is all to say, this might yet totally be a viable and legally unblockable business avenue for a third party to initiate. I'm just not sure there's enough demand to warrant (read: pay for) the effort involved. Maybe if you can have an LLM read the api docs of the service where you want to do the import and autogenerate a mostly-working version?
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.
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.
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!
[1]: http://www.scilor.com/grooveshark-downloader.html
Wait what, how does (did?) that work?
And more importantly (I can find the opus files myself): can/could it retrieve my account data to know which songs to download?
I've been able to partially reconstruct my music from localStorage, downloaded songs on my phone (yay for having root and access to that data folder), and memory, but it's still incomplete
Fwiw, here's my own little contribution to getting song data from Grooveshark, in my first blog post: https://lgms.nl/blog-1 (not my first blog site though). Happy to meet other fans :D
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.
I’ve looked, I’ve never found anything that seems to both cover all the bases and not feel like a bad Microsoft clone.
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/
Haven't found a good self-hosted Sheets alternative yet.
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 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.
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'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 tried Nextcloud a couple of years ago but found it really buggy and slow. Even the basic notes editor on Android was absolutely terrible. Absolutely no comparison to what I'm using now, Obsidian with Syncthing.
Can anyone recommend a good sheets alternative other than Nextcloud?
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.
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.
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.
Resellers handle a bunch of compliance paperwork necessary for the government, and are also contracted for migration and support needs.
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.
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.
Yes. Do you have a paid account? It's in the Google Admin console. It gives you a PIN to enter when you call.
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.
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.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pyspread
We already pay nearly $90/mo for 6 seats!
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.
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.
- Donald Knuth
Start with a gsheet, when it breaks build something else.
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.
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.
I guess Google Sheets invalidates some of my arguments, but Excel certainly does not. And, even if the feature is there, I've never seen them applied.
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.
Those users are accustomed to doing their work in a spreadsheet so it makes it harder to automate the process.
Spreadsheets are amazing tools, but they must not be used as the source of truth.
To an accountant, excel spreadsheet is a source of truth. There is no undetermined behavior. They can look at the calculations underlying the spreadsheet and understand what is happening, no different than a developer looking at source code. They do in fact have their own forms of unit tests considering these data are audited in a far more rigorous fashion than most any code that ships with unit tests.
He sold the business for $400M. No outside capital, he was the only owner.
https://github.com/HermanMartinus/bearblog/
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.
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.
Sharing Excel sheets and keeping them in sync is tedious. (Even with O365/OneDrive)
This may also include sharing between your own devices.
I wonder what the best non-mega corp solution there is for this.
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.
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.
Is that the case? I find that super interesting. No sexy Slack or Teams type of thing?
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.
And then, of course, if you want reproducibility, you just check in Colab notebooks into the source control.
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.
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).
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.
The maintainability of the resulting systems was not great, but they did the job and worse is better I guess..
Kind of an open source Google Forms/ Access where you could deploy front ends very quickly and have it hit a DB
Or try Airtable.
https://www.seangoedecke.com/the-simplest-thing-that-could-p...
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