[anyfactor]

I've built quite a few dashboards while working on proof-of-concept feature/product engineering. Even though people often think I'm joking, almost always the backend database was a Google Sheet. Google Sheets has great API support, easy to write functionality, convenient read and file dumps, works well with Pandas/SQL, and has a universally appreciated UX. Data validation can be annoying if the "admin" directly enters data, but for building a proof of concept, nothing beats Google Sheets. The data from Google Sheets would be passed through an API to a web UI/dashboard. The dashboard I built for end users was a simple Bootstrap (Vue-Bootstrap) table from the API, with enough easy-to-use filters and views to work out of the box. If the data was too large, I would use a templated snippet to convert the JSON into a card view. Ignoring long-term maintainability, this was one of the most foolproof ways to build dashboards. After that, I'd slap Firebase Auth on top, and that was it.

I haven't worked on these types of projects for nearly two years now. Folks I know use Retool or Softr with an API connectivity platform like Portable, Pipedream, or Zapier. If you're staring at a spreadsheet on a daily basis, the next step should be looking into an app builder combined with an API connection platform.

[smusamashah]

Monzo (online bank in UK) let you see all your transactions in a Google sheet (with some caveats e.g. interest earned is skipped). I wanted to make a total wealth chart over all years.

It's so damn complicated in Google sheets. In MS Excel I could simply make a pivot chart, apply any aggregation on days/weeks and be done with it. But with Sheets I had to make a new aggregate column, filter data in another new column, and make a chart on that.

Your comment does explain that API is why they export to sheets and not excel but Google sheets is way behind in ease of use.

[BillinghamJ]

Google Sheets can do that - https://officewheel.com/group-dates-in-pivot-table-google-sh...

[smusamashah]

This is the text book answer. Not something you can actually do on a live sheet with all transactions. If you want to use a different aggregate e.g. week instead of month or skip first year or something like that you will be making these columns all over again.

[miki123211]

My bank just exports to CSV, which is trivially importable to Excel, Sheets, Pandas or whatever else you need.

[maxique]

As I understand it, the appeal of Monzo's way is it's live updating rather than having to log in to some horribly outdated online banking portal and manually export

[smusamashah]

Yes exactly. The Google sheet is live. I couldn't just add a column in live sheet either. I had to copy the sheet using a formula so that its always up to date. And still had to use to other sheets. Chart is in the 4th sheet.

In excel I would not have to do any of that.

[flokie]

What about just plain old query() SQL i usually find the easiest vs. mucking around with pivot tables.

[Closi]

SQL is fine if you don't want to play with the data interactively - but that's the real benefit of Pivot Tables.

Things like drilling through, filtering/slicing, and then generating a graph, all in SaaS without having to run anything local.

[smusamashah]

Yes exactly, excel's Pivot tables and charts are more powerful.

[homebrewer]

You're fine with Google seeing complete information about your income and spending? I'm not one of those truly paranoid, but this seems like a bit too much.

[pxeger1]

What’s your risk model here? Google are not manually or automatically inspecting the contents of your spreadsheets in order to profile you and show you better-personalised ads. Not enough people have such a spreadsheet for it to be worth it for them, I’m sure - and they also probably already know approximately how wealthy you are. Unless you’re under investigation for fraud or something, I doubt the government could get much use out of being able to access your financial spreadsheets via Google compared to the information they already get directly from banks etc. So that only really leaves criminals (for whom I still can’t see a great incentive to read your spreadsheets), and I also don’t really think your Google account is much less secure than your computer’s local storage (if that’s the other place you would keep it)

[mixmastamyk]

We’ve learned over and over that tech companies do things which seemingly make no sense to us, but do to them. Not being able to imagine it is not sufficient. Nothing is deleted anymore as well, in hopes it will be useful later.

That said I don’t see a huge risk here, unless combined with lots of other data. Would probably avoid though.

[II2II]

I simply want minimal exposure of my personal data since I don't want to go through life thinking about risk models. Not only is it time consuming, but my creative juices simply don't flow when it comes down to exploiting people (nor do I want them to flow in that direction).

[londons_explore]

I only care about humans seeing my data.

Most big tech companies very rarely/never let a human review private customer data. Therefore I'm fine handing all the data over to big tech companies.

I don't really understand any other point of view - if you're worried about a machine seeing your private stuff, why did you type it into a keyboard in the first place?

[remus]

> if you're worried about a machine seeing your private stuff, why did you type it into a keyboard in the first place?

Who owns that machine is important though. I don't mind putting my card details in via my phone to buy something because there's a level of trust in the whole system (it's my phone, I have a level of trust that google is not going to steal my card details via android, and a level of trust that the shop is legit and will process my order.)

If some random person off the street asked me to type my card details into their phone that's a very different ball game as I don't inherently trust them.

[briandear]

I don’t care that much about card details. If I see a fraudulent transaction, I dispute it and it’s done. But my personal financial details/etc — that’s much different than a payment mechanism.

[sneak]

> Most big tech companies very rarely/never let a human review private customer data. Therefore I'm fine handing all the data over to big tech companies.

This isn't true. Google and Apple and others turn over user data to human analysts at NSA and FBI and others without search warrants all of the time, on hundreds of thousands of user accounts per year.

To be fine handing all the data over to big tech companies, you have to be fine handing all of the data over to US federal cops and intelligence services, too, because that's what giving the data (in non-e2ee form) to big tech means.

[martyvis]

Actually I have heard the exact opposite of what you are stating is true. Both Google and Apple fight very hard to avoid handing data to authorities. They don't want to be seen as some sort of easy conduit to government surveillance or shill. How does that benefit their reputation? I know of one case where Google spent millions on lawyers fighting government wanting access to an activist's email. Their FAQ here makes their policy pretty clear. https://support.google.com/transparencyreport/answer/9713961...

[sneak]

Apple’s own transparency report indicates they turn over data to the USG for over 100,000 different apple IDs each year in the no-warrant-or-probable-cause (FISA orders and NSLs) category.

(Mind you; this includes device location histories due to geoip logs, unique identifiers, iMessage histories, photos, documents, everything.)

The cases they are allowed to tell you about aren’t in this category. They aren’t even allowed to say exactly how many of the secret warrantless orders they received, or exactly how many users were affectee, only 500-count ranges.

For just Apple, for just January 2023 to June 2023 (six months):

National Security - FISA Non-Content Requests

Table for National Security - FISA Non-Content Requests Data

Requests Received 0 - 499

Users/Accounts 40,500 - 40,999

National Security - FISA Content Requests

Table displaying National Security - FISA Content Requests

Requests Received 500 - 999

Users/Accounts 50,500 - 50,999

National Security Letter Requests

Table for National Security Letter Requests data

Requests Received 0 - 499

Users/Accounts 1,000 - 1,499

National Security Letters where Non-disclosure Order Lifted

0

I encourage you to read it for yourself:

https://www.apple.com/legal/transparency/us.html

[diggan]

That seems like the least "compromising" data, compared to other things we let them get.

Imagine there are whole countries out there where income is public and accessible to anyone ;)

[asveikau]

I put recipes in google sheets. I hope that Google gets the ratios right on some killer ragù.

[cootsnuck]

I hope you don't use Gmail if that's your attitude lol.

[OxfordOutlander]

+1 for googlesheets. It is stable, and provided you don't exceed the API limits, you can run a lot of data through it. Appscript is also incredibly powerful if you work with tools that have decent APIs. With a few lines of js and the built in trigger functions, you can have an automatically updating dashboard with email notifications when certain conditions are met (e.g. balance too low, user engagement metric does X etc).

[zem]

I've built a scrabble tournament management app on google sheets, because it was the easiest way I could think of to let multiple people edit it with all the others seeing live updates. From a developer's point of view it kind of sucks, having to maintain everything in one large javascript file and having to use spreadsheet tabs as input and output, not to mention manually attaching the script to a new sheet for every tournament. But the user experience has been excellent, modulo a few permissions glitches.

I'm still trying to rewrite it as a self hosted web app this year because the aforementioned permissions glitches and the difficulty of doing versioned deployments has made me reluctant to continue relying on google, but overall sheets has been a huge boon and we have gotten years of use out of it.

[specproc]

The article mentions appsheets, which I absolutely loved in my last role.

Brilliant for knocking up very simple internal tooling off the back of a Google Sheet. Most importantly, there was zero fucking around with IT on it, as it was already included in our workspace package.

[ramzis]

> for building a proof of concept, nothing beats Google Sheets

Supabase is free and checks all the boxes in addition to having auth, vector search, logs, security, and not being ... Google

[mettamage]

Love it. I think my prototyping capabilities just extended by this comment

[maximinus_thrax]

Back in 2010, I was in a work meeting making small talk and we were discussing how cringe some advertising is nowadays. One of us, a program manager who was ~15 years my senior told me it's because we're not the target demographic and that millennials are targeted differently, mainly through word-of-mouth and generally Guerrilla marketing tactics.

Whenever I see articles like these and comments like yours, I can't stop thinking about that meeting.

Edit: to clarify, I am not accusing you of anything. But I do suspect the article to be part of a Google marketing campaign.

[ezst]

If I want a database set up in minutes just to focus on the business side and nothing else, I simply fire up a new Django project (I suspect any other framework with an ORM and auto-generated CRUD UIs would be equally competent for that).

I have nothing against Google Sheets, I really haven't put much thought into it in this context, but I would need some convincing that it's a better and easier way to kick things off.

[sjsdaiuasgdia]

That Django project needs a host to run on, even if it's just your local machine.

If you want others to interact with it, you need to expose it to the internet through some means and think through the security implications of doing so.

The Google Sheets approach doesn't need you to manage a process or web server. It is instantly shareable while letting Google worry about security, performance, availability, etc.

The specifics of the "what's better?" ratio can shift depending on comfort level / experience with either product, or what infrastructure you may already have available to deploy to. But building on top of GApps does mean you get a lot of useful aspects "free".

[ezst]

Thanks, that's a valid point. I have never thought of publishing a PoC web app as more than pushing some files on a server and editing a config file, but now I see how not everyone can be familiar with that.

[liontwist]

I like to just start with a SQLite UI editor.

You can just query a database and work with the results directly . In a dynamic language like python there is little advantage to loading rows into classes. That Django query language is so painful and opaque.

[ezst]

Practically, Django's admin *becomes* the SQLite UI editor you are referring to, I suspect. Starting with it, the amount of UI code, backend code or SQL code to be written becomes a matter of how far you want to stretch the PoC in either direction (more effort on the views for a prettier/more unique front-end, more controller code for more business logic/cases covered, more database work to assess how the data model will scale).

[liontwist]

I’m saying I prefer to design a database with sql, views, and native applications rather than python classes and web interfaces.

[tonyhart7]

hey we do the same thing lol, google sheets is great and sometimes if I have or want more I can just simply use pocketbase for easy solution

these 2 tools is great for easy/fast prototype various project and honestly its kinda hard to replace

[xtiansimon]

Slightly off-topic.

In small business accounting, I have a persistent need for a FileMaker Pro like solution for invoices. FMP was conscious of on-screen layout and print.

ReTool has been recommended as similar replacement for FMP but they don’t have the idea of creating print-ready documented receipts and invoices. You don’t even need to print it, you just need to keep it for the IRS.

I love the idea of using Google Sheets and turnkey app building apps. But I still need documentation.

[carlosjobim]

There's gotta be a ton of solutions for sale for small business accounting, no? Among them FileMaker pro?

[xtiansimon]

> "There's gotta be a ton...Among them FileMaker pro?"

You'd think. I don't know what Claris did last week, but when I last dived into this small pool about 12 months ago their license + hosting was something like 2k/year (looking now it might have gone down, or their pricing page is hiding the fees?). Add on top you need to develop, maintain, support your project. These costs are not insignificant for a "small business"--and by the SBA definition my clients are in the bottom 2-18% by employee (size) & revenue.

[vishnugupta]

Currently I manage my startup’s accounting in Google sheet, and your comment gave me an idea to enhance it with Google Forms!

[ezst]

That... Sounds scary.

[ska]

Clunky, but should be ok assuming a) a pretty simple structure and cashflow b) properly implemented double-entry, and c) backups.

[jayd16]

Accounting in a spreadsheet is scary?

[ezst]

Accounting of your holiday's expenses or hobby project? Sure. For a whole business and all the legal and practical obligation that entails? Nope. Not a chance. Just give me a proper accounting software so I don't have to second-guess myself at every turn as to whether my code or my interpretation of the law is correct.

[mosburger]

I wonder if anyone has ever made an ORM adapter that works with Google Sheets as its "Database"?

[dotancohen]

Firebase auth? Would it be possible for a savvy end user to replicate your API calls to Google Sheets directly to bypass the auth?