
Ask HN: How do you use Google Spreadsheets? - ktamura
My team at work has been increasing relying on Google Spreadsheets to keep track of data. For example, our internal KPI dashboard runs on top of Google Sheets. I&#x27;ve largely ported my Excel models to Google Sheets so that it can be easily shared (we don&#x27;t subscribe to Office 365, and even then, the collaboration experience is way better on Google Sheets)<p>For lack of a better term, I feel that Google Sheets has become a &quot;data warehouse&quot; for our business folks. Does this experience mirror yours?
======
zerocrat
My experience with Google spreadsheets in a business environment setting is
that it served to compensate what is missing in our logistics software.

It seems to be a go to tool for quick fixes, implemented without high level
planning. Although I do not know for certain, it is apparent that most
formulas and templates on google spreadsheets were created by low-mid employee
initiatives.

In other words, employee Z is fed up of X feature lacking in our logistics
software and would create a template to address this.

The problem is all the data is segregated and not assembled under one point of
view. However, the google search function reduces this weakness significantly.

From my personal point of view, our organization loved it.

Organization profile: Large business,~500-1000 employees

To answer your question, yes it had become a data warehouse, only on niche
data segments, that were not addressed in our main tool.

------
strick
Saw this recently: [https://medium.com/why-not/how-we-re-doing-stats-at-
howdy-29...](https://medium.com/why-not/how-we-re-doing-stats-at-
howdy-2956f88115f6#.pl5aauwqa)

~~~
ktamura
Thanks, this is really helpful!

------
rahimnathwani
labnol.org has great articles about doing cool things with Google Sheets, e.g.
logging/alerting web site up time, mail merges, monitoring changes to web
sites.

I really like the sharing functionality, and would hate to go back to the days
of emailing around multiple versions of a spreadsheet.

The ability to pull in arbitrary stuff from the web (using IMPORTXML()) and
easy access to exchange rates and stock prices (using GOOGLEFINANCE()) are
great.

------
tedmiston
This is cool. Do you update your sheets for the dashboard via an API?

