spreadsheets discourse

2025-10-05

I found Maybe-Ray's Why I only use Google sheets compelling enough to summarize:

• Optimize for ease, then enhance or pivot as needed.
• Particularly in dynamic environments where scope isn't realized until work starts.
• If you think a simpler tool suits a project, try it to reveal the project's full scope, then iterate as needed.
• Useless software built for fun in your spare time might not serve as useful software for efficiency on the clock.

The same goes for choice comments from the Hacker News discussion for the above post. On the competitive edge of Google Sheets or spreadsheets in general:

• corry touches upon how featureful, iterative, understood, malleable, and portable spreadsheets are.
• codeulike remembers a saying: "a spreadsheet is the second best tool for any job"
• Zigurd and Loughla both say Google Sheets (and Google Suite's) edge over the competition is seamless multiplayer.
• mixcocam advocates starting with Google Sheets then building something else once it breaks. They also quoted Donald Knuth:

"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%."

On privacy and security:

• sneak reminds people that Google voluntarily discloses storage info to the United States federal government without a warrant.
• Imustaskforhelp replied to hn-ifs saying that Cryptpad has a web interface and LibreOffice works offline if you require data privacy and security.
• TrackerFF warns against vendor lock-in and suggests regular backups of online artifacts, particularly in the case of Google products.
  • Aachen replied to TrackerFF saying to not only keep backups for both local and online things you want to keep, but regularly test if your backups restore properly.
  • GuB-42 replied to Aachen touting the usual rule of having 3 copies: one on your computer, one in cold storage (say, an external hard drive), one offsite (say, the cloud or elsewhere). They also warn that any device can fail at any time.
  • lemonlearnings stresses the importance of interoperability with how .xlsx files can be used with Google Sheets, Microsoft, or LibreOffice.

See these anecdotes supporting Google Sheets or spreadsheets in general below:

maccard says:

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.

jeffbee says:

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.

Cthulhu_ replied to mixcocam's reply from above:

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.

mbesto also replied to mixcocam's reply from above:

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.

cloudking says:

Built entire businesses on Google Sheets and Apps Script. Powerful combo.

Given the above, it seems clear that I could capitalize on the value of spreadsheets much more. In the spirit of finding inspiration like how others' posts inspire me to write, I'm curious: what businesses, projects, or other initiatives have you built with Google Sheets or spreadsheets in general?

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