I love Google Sheets. It is so much more powerful than 99.9% of the users appreciate. Here is how I use it at my day job as head of PM at New Relic:
- Fetch deals closed and lost hourly from Salesforce
- Fetch for each of our 14k+ paid accounts usage metrics using our Insights product
- Pull both items into a nice color-coded business dashboard that is near realtime
- Send said dashboard out as a PDF to a bunch of stakeholders daily/weekly
- Save PDF snapshot into Google Drive so I can easily pull up historical reports
If you haven't tried out Google App Script and supercharged your spreadsheets, give it a shot. It's also basically the only way the engineer in me gets to code much these days, so I have fun with it too :)
PS: Google Sheets is definitely much slower for pure spreadsheets than Excel, no question about that. But by using cloud-based JavaScript + custom code, I can often work around that issue by writing functions that process the data quickly and report on what I need. Ultimately I end up getting much more out of it than Excel.
For all the non-programmers out there that are comfortable with spreadsheets, this site - http://codingisforlosers.com/ -is pretty epic for building out a ton of dashboards and data pipelines with Google Sheets.
I get all the good things Google Apps do. It's wonderful. Yet, until Google has a "contract with our users" that includes a level of customer service and human conflict resolution I would not touch them with a ten foot pole.
Why? Because they could take it all away --and I do mean ALL-- overnight. Email, apps, etc.
I've seen many people run into the Google ban for reasons not more complicated than not being experts and using one of Google's tools in a way that triggers an algorithmic ban. And this doesn't have to have anything to do with fraud or scams.
Had one client, probably ten years ago, who moved all of his 200+ domains to a service Google introduced at the time called "Google for Domains". A domain parking service with ads inserted into the parked domains auto-magically by Google. Prior to that all of his domains were parked at GoDaddy, who used Google to stuff ads into the domains. As soon as the service was offered he figured it was a good idea to remove GoDaddy as the middle-man in that equation.
He transferred all of his domains. There was an approval process. All domains were approved overnight. Done deal. Right?
Wrong! Two days later Google sent him an email informing him that all of his Google accounts were now permanently suspended (aka: closed) with no recourse. Reason given: Unusual click activity on some of the domains parked with Google for Domains.
This guy ran (runs) a multi-million dollar manufacturing business. The very idea that he would sit there clicking on ads to earn a quarter of a cent per click is, well, stupid.
Anyhow, this one event cost him all of his Google tools. His email, calendar, contacts, apps and whatever else he was using at the time. No recourse. Not conversation with a human being. Nothing. Done. Puff. Evaporated.
Since that one event I have been of the opinion that using any of these Google tools for a business is, to put it plainly, stupid and dangerous. You could be betting the farm on a petulant algorithm and no customer service of any kind to protect you from it.
I still have Excel files from decades ago that I can open and manipulate today. Microsoft could go out of business and I could still open these files. And the software has never lacked functionality, either directly, through add-ins or programmability.
The bottom line for me is that if something is business-critical it isn't a good idea to rely on a service that could be yanked overnight (I do mean that literally). If Google had customer service and a human (and humane) process to deal with issues it would be a very different story. I don't want free stuff. We have tens of thousands of dollars invested in all kinds of software. I want stuff I can rely on because my businesses depend on it.
The only way you are going to have to security is if you pay for well supported software that has a team behind it who understand how important it is for a business to have the ability to wake up every morning knowing that the tools they come to rely on for their daily work won't evaporate overnight.
I truly don't care how many shinny new things, candy and chocolate Google throws on the table. Until they prove they understand this one point they represent a business-killing risk nobody should be willing to accept.
BTW, this is a problem with nearly all Internet giants. Facebook, Amazon and others are horrible companies from the standpoint of how they deal with their business customers.
The experience described is no longer relevant. I've gotten (phone!) calls from Google within minutes of posting for help, and I live in a tiny nation in the middle of the Pacific Ocean.
In my experience Google provides amazing service for tools that you are paying for. If you're using Google Suite/Apps to access your sheets, you should be just fine.
> I want stuff I can rely on because my businesses depend on it.
Well we're talking about using Google spreadsheets as a backend for an app. It should go without saying that this wouldn't be a mission-critical use.
In terms of your anecdote about your client's experience - I can't speak to this, as I'm not directly familiar with this "Google for Domains" service and I don't have enough details from your post to comment.
However, I can assure you that Google definitely has a customer support department - I work with them every day =).
Also - it's important to distinguish between the free products we offer - and the paid products - where you actually give us money. In the latter case, there is nearly always a customer support hotline, and in many cases, a binding SLA agreement.
I work in Google Cloud, on the support organisation side of things - and I can confirm there is definitely phone support (along with chat and email), we do have SLAs on all of our products and you are definitely speaking to a human. It's not particularly hard to reach a person - either go through your admin panel (https://admin.google.com - click the big question mark), or all of our 24/7 support numbers for each country are right there on the website:
My own anecdote - several years ago before I started with Google, I subscribed to Google Play Music - I accidentally un-favourited a track once, and I couldn't find a way to find it again. So on a whim I rang Google Play Music support, and went straight to a person within seconds. She was very friendly, and tried to help me find the history - unfortunately it wasn't there, but the customer service was pretty damn good - a heck of a lot better than all of my experiences with several un-named mobile phone and broadband companies. (Hint: I'm in Australia)
You might not know the answer to this question. If you don't, it might be interesting to see if you can get to the answer internally.
Let's say I setup a site and have AdSense place ads on it. I don't touch any of the ads. I never click any of them. Yet, for some reason, the ads see a bunch of click activity. The reasons can be many, from sheer randomness to a competitor using it as an attack vector (to deny revenue and more).
I have seen this precise scenario lead to the absolute shutdown of a Google account. And that means every single service, including email and docs. Gone. Done. No recourse. No way to even recover the data.
Has this changed?
Do you have a way for people affected by such algorithmic issues to engage in a conversation with something that does not resemble a totalitarian regime?
The paid vs. free part is immaterial. People are relying on your products and offerings. Free is a strategy for dominance. I can understand free products not having a human in the loop. What I can't understand is the dictatorial/totalitarian relationship with your users, who, free or not, have come to rely on these tools.
I believe you're referring her to Adwords clickfraud - is that right? I don't work on that team, so can't comment on their policies (and even if I did, I probably can't comment publicly).
However, my understanding is normally AdWords accounts are suspended for billing/fraud related reasons (e.g. you don't pay your bills) - e.g.:
I haven't seen it lead immediately to the actual Google login itself being suspended. However, if your the actual Google account was suspended - there is a set procedure you can follow to un-suspend it - there should have been a link in the notification email.
Also - paid or free isn't immaterial - it actually does make a difference.
If it's a free account (E.g. @gmail.com), you can fill in the online forms to appeal the suspension.
If it's a paid account (i.e. part of a GSuite domain - or it's old name, Google for Work), then what often happens are individual accounts are suspended, and you talk to your own domain administrator to get that resolved. There are ways to get a domain suspended (e.g. you don't pay your bills) but they're usually fairly obvious.
(Disclaimer: I work for Google, but the above comments are my own opinions).
You are confusing your own products. AdSense. Not AdWords.
The various forms Google makes available for appealing suspensions are pretty much useless.
I urge you not to believe what I am saying here as well as not feeding within your own internal echo chamber. Use your own search product to search the 'net for the thousands of stories of various forms of algorithmic account suspensions, the damage they cause and how frustrating it is to get anywhere with Google.
Based on what I've witnessed personally and what I've read online the idea of relying on Google products for anything business critical terrifies me.
You --Google-- needs to truly care for it's clients and, as I said in a prior post, issue a guarantee. I am NOT talking about a guarantee of uptime for a service, that's irrelevant here.
What I am referring to are guarantees of service longevity as well as protection and recourse from algorithmic account suspensions. A business person needs to have the ability to address and discuss misunderstandings or problems and not have their entire Google-provided infrastructure evaporate overnight with nowhere to go.
To me the matter of free vs. paid is immaterial. Google and companies like Google use free services to gather and monetize audiences. For example, nobody would pay for search. Nobody would pay for a Facebook account. So you use free to bait the hook and capture audiences. This is a technique as old as the Internet, with browsers such as Netscape and earlier being the first land-grab-through-free-products.
If you are going to have a virtual monopoly by resorting to free products you also have to have the responsibility of not causing your user base irreparable damage by pulling those product either by early termination of the services or termination or suspension of account without recourse. At the moment you are large enough to not have to care about this one bit and nobody has challenged you in court for this terrible issue.
You ask for guarantees that an account will never be suspended, or that a service will never be discontinued.
I don't think that's even possible.
For one - abuse is a real thing.
Just ask Amazon about abuse and spam on their AWS platform. There is a reason that you can't just type in any credit card, and spin up 100 EC2 instances, or send 100,000 emails - depending on signals, Amazon seem to manually verify some accounts. But on top of that, they take proactive steps to suspend accounts acting in suspicious ways.
We do much the same.
It is a hard problem, and undoubtedly there are false positive and false negatives. That is regrettable - but I don't think allowing AWS or GCP to become a free haven for spammers or abusers is the answer.
You are correct that we need good procedures to deal with appeals of these things.
Regarding never deprecating a product - Google has started many products, and some of those have been shutdown. I know there's a lot of angst on HackerNews about Google Reader in particular - I myself used it a lot in fact. However, taking off my Google hat - of all companies, they are usually the best about letting you export your data, or migrate it away. When a product gets shutdown, you usually have 6 months, a year etc. to export your data. Even before I started there, they had Google Takeout which basically lets you export your data from any Google product in portable formats e.g. mbox, JSON files etc. Open standards are important to us - e.g. see our work on Kubernetes.
If there's a specific are you think we're failing on - please let me know, and I'll see if there's anything I am able to share, or if there's somebody I can link you up with.
I'm sure there are ways to automated the backup procedure. Most of these files are exported to known formats (doc/docx, xls, etc.). A quick Google search gave me[1], but I'm sure that this can be made via API calls and a lambda function running freely on AWS.
There’s also a newer thing called Google Data Studio, which creates neat visualizations directly from Sheets with even less effort.
It’s a no-brainer to feed all sorts of metrics (business or otherwise) from let’s say a Django app into Sheets, and with Data Studio decision makers can have all the freedom to combine them into complicated dashboards in accordance with current business landscape, pinging engineers only if new things need to be tracked.
I have OAuth working. It's a pain and I'm sure I've kludged it because it requires going to a _specific_ sheet and re-authenticating every few months. But it works! Hit me up at patrick@lightbody.net and I'd be happy to share my work. Maybe we can polish it up and get it published to Github.
Ever since I learned R and Python, I have dumped Excel. All my heavy lifting is done in a proper programming language, and for all the spreadsheet things that I need, Google Sheets is perfect. There's also something pretty magical about the sharing functionality when two people work on a document at the same time. Not to mention that all my sheets are a browser shortcut away, anywhere.
Totally agree on Google Sheets. I love the connectivity of sheets and the best application I have seen is grades at the school district when you have a lot of kids. It is so easy for me and my wife
PS: Google Sheets is definitely much slower for pure spreadsheets than Excel, no question about that. But by using cloud-based JavaScript + custom code, I can often work around that issue by writing functions that process the data quickly and report on what I need. Ultimately I end up getting much more out of it than Excel.