
Record macros in Google Sheets - thenipper
https://gsuiteupdates.googleblog.com/2018/04/think-macro-google-sheets.html
======
chollida1
For me the killer feature of excel is RTD's

[https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/help/285339/how-to-
creat...](https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/help/285339/how-to-create-a-
realtimedata-server-for-excel)

Bloomberg, Reuters, and almost every trader in the world use this to pump in
real time data to excel and have it automatically calculate for them.

to be fair, VBA is awesome as well, and almost certainly more used in general
but being able to automatically push in new data and have your sheet
automatically recalculate due to it saves so much programming work for simple
exploratory work.

Intentionally inflammatory statement to prove a point....

The simplest way to tell if someone has ever been a real trader is to ask if
they know what =BDP(.....) does.

I don't see how google sheets competes on this level with excel.

~~~
rando444
You'll never see how it competes if you've never explored the software.

I transitioned all my realtime Excel documents over to Google sheets something
like 5 years ago now, but the ability to do this has existed for much longer.

It has the distinct advantage of always running. I don't need to leave my
computer on, the sheets are always updating somewhere in the cloud, always up
to date when I open them, and trigger actions whenever certain criteria is
met.

The alternative would be to leave an Excel sheet running on a computer 24x7
and making sure that computer doesn't power down or reboot, or building a
database solution on a hosted server somewhere.

The main advantage Excel has is that you can do some things a little faster
since you're using your own resources.. but if I needed speed, I wouldn't be
working out of a spreadsheet.

------
drivingmenuts
Damn, I wish Numbers had macros, but I get the feeling that Apple doesn't
really take Numbers seriously.

And AppleScript doesn't count, in my book.

------
senthil_rajasek
This is a welcome addition. It surprises me that it took this long for Google
to introduce this into sheets while other competitors like Zoho
([https://blog.zoho.com/sheet/macros-pivot-tables-more-in-
zoho...](https://blog.zoho.com/sheet/macros-pivot-tables-more-in-zoho-
sheet.html)) have critical Excel functionality like macros since 2008.

~~~
lern_too_spel
Sheets has had macros for a long time via Apps Script, which I've used to
automate a lot of simple tasks. The feature added here is the ability to
record macros from manual actions.

