alt Hacker NewsI don't know much about advanced Google Docs, but I know that's the far from true for Google Sheets. Google Sheets covers a shit ton of ground that Excel covers, but a serious user can never replace Excel with Sheets.
We had a lot of marketing and sales people who wanted to use Google Sheets instead of Excel to load sales reports from a shared PG database. This is of course a built-in feature (loading a PG table as a sheet) in Excel. Google Sheets obviously doesn't support any imports. They are all paid plugins, and they all make you pay per row or cell or column.
You can write a plugin to do it, except their funky AppScript (which is a custom synchronous Javascript/V8 environment where there is no async or callbacks, and promises block.
Except, the plugin can only connect to MySQL. PG support ask has been open since 2011. They decided in 2014 that they don't plan to support PG. Then in 2018 they thought maybe they can only support GCP Postgres.[1]
Ok, fine. You make your own API to call and load data. No, you can't return more than 50 MBs. So better split your query.
Oh, you want to load a 50MB CSV? There are 3 different APIs for that:
- "Import from GDrive". This is the one you want. Import 50MB in a couple of seconds. But it also requires the most permissions to full access the user's GDrive
- "Basic Import API". This imports at ~100kbps but not always. gets slower for large data
- "Advanced Import API". This imports at ~250kbps but not always. gets slower for small data
and you need to run your own benchmarks[2][3] to understand which API to use in which context, then keep reruning them as things change.
[1]: https://issuetracker.google.com/issues/36752790?pli=1
[2]: https://gist.github.com/tanaikech/d102c9600ba12a162c667287d2...
[3]: https://gist.github.com/tanaikech/030203c695b308606041587e6d...
Replies
> but a serious user can never replace Excel with Sheets.
This doesn't mean anything.
I am always amazed at how much people can bash Microsoft products when the whole reason to use them is often that they are the best thing around, with the most features and allows you to do things that would be hard/impossible otherwise.
The most egregious are the apple fanboys who try to pretend that the iWork suite is even close to being a replacement for Microsoft office. Like sure, if you only need to write letters and resumes it will do but at this point any free office suite will do...