
Ask HN: Spreadsheet/Grid interface as an operations back end? - sandGorgon
This is a product design question. im wondering has anyone here scaled up using spreadsheet based interfaces to run operations ? Think ecommerce&#x2F;Amazon - would you have been successful building your operations&#x2F;shipping&#x2F;accounting systems on a Google sheets like panel (connected to an API) ?
Its a tradeoff between operations that need to be operating on a single &quot;row of data&quot; (one user, one account, one order, etc) versus bulk updates &quot;update all as shipped&quot;, etc<p>Is a spreadsheet the perfect paradigm that solves for both ?
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gregorymichael
Built a non-trivial internal app with Flask + Google Spreadsheets this year
(wrote up a blog post on the plumbing). It was fantastic for rapidly deploying
a prototype, opening up data entry to non-technical folks without having to
build a CUD interface or worry about authentication.

I did start running into problems with API rate limiting and speed. Not sure
this would work for a large amount of data, but it was easily the most
_productive_ app I've built in terms of lines of code vs. impact it had on the
organization.

[https://www.twilio.com/blog/2017/02/an-easy-way-to-read-
and-...](https://www.twilio.com/blog/2017/02/an-easy-way-to-read-and-write-to-
a-google-spreadsheet-in-python.html)

