[throwaway2016a]

> a lot of us underestimate is the flexibility of things like spreadsheet

Even though I love using cool and new tech I often ask first, "can a spreadsheet do this?" Or as is often the case now, a Google Doc spreadsheet.

For example, our office TV dashboard is just Chrome with an off-the-shelf plugin that cycles through open tabs that are mostly display Google Sheets.

It has two benefits:

- It took almost no time at all to set up and 0 code

- Non-technical people can update the numbers easily

Plus Google has an API so if we wanted to add data to the sheets programmatically we could.

[zitterbewegung]

A company I used to work at got burned because their scheduling system based on a google doc spreadsheet broke due to google pushing a new change.

[_coldfire]

I've seen a few companies using google docs because no one knew excel also has a collaborative spreadsheet mode. All had MSoffice.

Last place had about 60 users. Average load time for the gdocs page is ~90 seconds. Users access the page dozens of times a day, most leave it open as a tab but memory usage became an issue.

Ever-increasing spreadsheet size eventually meant multiple computers were crashing/becoming unusable with the sheet open.

I offered to migrate it to Excel/VBA, was an old tiny codebase for simple calculations. Management bought more RAM instead, made me laugh.

[dgfgfdagasdfgfa]

> Excel/VBA

I don't believe this works on the mac; has this changed?

[_coldfire]

There's MSoffice for mac, haven't used it but it certainly exists. Unless you mean VBA? Don't see why they'd sell office without macros.

[Bahamut]

That's pretty much what my company does, and we're a SaaS company.

Simple is better oftentimes.