
Social Movements Are Pushing Google Sheets to the Breaking Point - raybb
https://onezero.medium.com/social-movements-are-pushing-google-sheets-to-the-breaking-point-28bb86b76043
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ENOTTY
Sheets seems like a good way to get to a MVP quickly to prove the concept. If
Sheets starts falling over due to demand, you know you've got a winner and its
time to invest in something more reliable.

~~~
arkitaip
Not everything is a MVP ready to disrupt. Sometimes all you have is a
spreadsheet with data that lots of people have a fleeting interest in.

~~~
toomuchtodo
A spreadsheet is a database you haven't yet performed a migration on yet. I
think the argument is less around better spreadsheets and more around
migrating that data into real datastores once constraints are encountered
(whether that's a desire to support large amounts of contributors, not run on
Google, the dataset has grown too large, etc).

It's hard to go from Google Sheets to a web frontend to Postgresql and a
snappy shared frontend. That is the problem statement to solve for imho
(interface, schema, data portability).

~~~
PeterCorless
No one has really solved the "Spreadsheet —> Database" migration painpoint. We
don't have anything that is universally easy-to-use. The equivalent of a
Hypercard or a Filemaker for the Web. (And no, I'm not talking about MongoDB
or other NoSQL; I'm talking about the kind of thing you can hand over to a
typical office worker.)

~~~
toomuchtodo
Agreed. I have a hunch that any solution to this problem will look similar to
[https://github.com/simonw/datasette](https://github.com/simonw/datasette) if
it develops. Tied together with [https://supabase.io/](https://supabase.io/)
and you've built a versatile, powerful, open data collaboration engine.

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ISL
With FindTheMasks, we found that tooling written around Sheets may also
confront the 5 million cell limit.

As you tack on extra tabs and handle more fields, it isn't too hard to
approach that limit.

If we do trip that threshold, we will be forced to degrade some functionality.

As a bonus, I don't believe that Sheets allows anyone to see exactly how many
cells are in use, so one lives with a probabilistic risk of lockup.

If we were continuing to handle large volumes of intake, a switch to Airtable
would be in the works. Fortunately, the PPE situation is at least somewhat
better than it was in March, so we are simply keeping the lights on and wheels
turning.

~~~
spacehunt
Airtable has a hard limit of 50,000 records across all tables in a base
though.

~~~
arthurcolle
That seems like a crazy low limit compared to the traditional spreadsheets I'm
used to.

Is there some special meaning of "record" in their vernacular?

~~~
spacehunt
Airtable is closer to a database than a spreadsheet. Records are represented
as rows in their default grid view, but there are other views available. They
can also be retrieved as JSON objects through the API that Airtable
automatically generate for you.

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snowwrestler
Not just social movements; I sat in a free career webinar and they posted a
Google Sheet link in the chat for all the participants to share LinkedIn
profile links. It crashed quickly and for the rest of the meeting the chat had
a steady stream of comments like "it's working now", "I'm locked out, please
help", "can anyone share the link to the sheet", "here's a link to another
sheet we can use", etc.

I sat there thinking "I can't believe there isn't a better option for this
sort of thing." Kind of surprised Zoom does not have a native feature for
meeting participants to share contact info with each other during the meeting.

~~~
scottlamb
The main problem with Google Sheets for that use case IIUC is that it's
designed to be prepared for any of the users to edit arbitrary cells which can
cause recomputations of other arbitrary cells, and it wants to give real-time
feedback to all the other users about every edit (and cursor movement). That
makes it harder to scale up to many simultaneous editors without compromises
in the backend (due to the graph of recalculations) and UI (clutter,
contention to claim the first blank line).

A custom web app for this purpose can scale better by being designed with the
knowledge each user only edits their own row and nothing else needs to be
recalculated. And of course it can have a tailored UI.

Unfortunately I don't know of any way for a non-developer to match that.
There's no fundamental reason IMHO that there couldn't be a nice rapid, code-
optional CRUD app generator, like Microsoft Access for the 21st century. Maybe
this is what Microsoft Lists will do? AirTable is a general-purpose web-based
RDBMS frontend, but I don't know if it scales well to many simultaneous
editors either, I don't think you can tailor the UI as much as I'd like, and I
hear folks complaining about database size limits.

You can get Google Sheets to scale better, but it's a bit awkward:

* Give folks a Google Forms link to edit their own information. This atomically claims and populates the row.

* Give folks a publish link (see File | Publish To the Web) to view everyone else's information. This link scales well because it doesn't let them update anything and (more annoyingly) it doesn't show changes until they hit refresh.

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blakesterz
"A Google support page states that “up to 100 people with view, edit, or
comment permissions can work on a Google Docs, Sheets, or Slides file at the
same time” and has a section devoted to troubleshooting files that become
unresponsive after being shared with many people, recognizing the common
pitfall."

That's a big number, but it's not as big as I'd expect from something from
Google. I'd assume the average number of people working on any Sheet is 1 or
2, but I'm surprised that haven't been able to scale it up to 1000 or more by
now.

~~~
pwinnski
Also in the piece, "Jonathan Rochelle, the lead product manager for Google’s
suite of collaborative tools from 2005 to 2013, said that he and his team
found that having more than 25 to 50 editors on a single document made it hard
for people to collaborate effectively."

The technical limitation is 2-4 times what the former product manager believed
was a human limitation already. Scaling beyond that doesn't seem like a
priority.

~~~
nitrogen
"View" was in that list though; is there a way to let more than 100 people
view a sheet?

~~~
joshuamorton
Yes, published mode.

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lukeschlather
I've been using Docs (and a bit of sheets) for stuff like this and haven't
noticed too much issues, though I usually keep under 10 people. Honestly I
hope Google _doesn 't_ try to address any of the complaints in this thread.

Google Docs/Sheets/Drive function a lot like Stardew Valley multiplayer, in
that pretty much anyone can do anything, and this allows really fluid
communication but it simply won't work with 100 people.

Sheets supports 100s of people to an extent (even more) but I wouldn't want
them to optimize for this. I think if I were in charge of it I would be
exploring ways that they can find UI paradigms that allow more seamless
interaction and realize the dreams that I think Google had when they built
Wave.

* What if you could embed live video/audio in a Doc?

* Sheets comments kind of suck.

* Is there a way to use comments that makes them more visible without ruining the sheet view? (Maybe not.)

* As this article says, people are often using a Sheet as a very hacky app dev platform. Is there a way to embed the sheet data in a Doc (or something Wave-like) that has a more seamless communication pattern?

* Is there a way to build small apps on the fly without messing with a bunch of macros?

Though I think a lot of this is about communication. I don't think Google
should be thinking about scaling, they should be thinking about those use
cases where you're talking to a small group of people and you need a little
custom app that can't take more than 30 seconds to put together or just
talking would be more efficient.

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Yhippa
Let's say they fix Google Sheets to be arbitrarily scalable. Now you have
another problem: how can that many people edit the Sheet simultaneousy and
still have it make sense?

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jlkuester7
The technologically maximum number of concurrent editors that Google Sheets
supports is perhaps the least important constraint when trying to crowdsource
an information-base. At a certain point (well below the point where Google
Sheets crashes) you run into community constraints around permissions,
validation, how you organize the data, how you record changes, how you discuss
changes.

That being said, this article seems to completely ignore the fact that there
are already well-established solutions to this problem. Off the top of my
head, wikis and GitHub/Lab pages offer very nice solutions to creating a
scale-able information-base with built-in features to help address some of the
challenges I raised above....

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disease
This is the second story on the front page about the weakness of modern
spreadsheet software. It could be cool if someone stepped forward and showed
us how to do spreadsheets using everything we now know, like what git did with
source control back in the mid 2000s.

~~~
raybb
Can you link to the other story? I'm not seeing it.

~~~
reallydontask
there you go

[https://www.theverge.com/2020/8/6/21355674/human-genes-
renam...](https://www.theverge.com/2020/8/6/21355674/human-genes-rename-
microsoft-excel-misreading-dates)

edit: HN link

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24070385](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24070385)

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aspenmayer
I feel like Sheets should gracefully fail much better than it does under load,
especially for supposedly being Google-scale. With more users, instead of not
loading at all, or starting then failing to load, it would be nice to see the
most recent change in read-only mode, and show an edit timeline like the
Internet Archive's Wayback Machine UI shows archive occurrences on a calendar.
Just a couple ideas for how Sheets could break down gracefully while retaining
usability.

~~~
reaperducer
_With more users, instead of not loading at all, or starting then failing to
load, it would be nice to see the most recent change in read-only mode_

I wonder if that's why the new version of macOS Numbers defaults to a read-
only mode — to ease the burden when the sheets are in collaboration.

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somurzakov
that means there is an opportunity for opensoirce, lightweight, self-hosted
Sheets. A product opportunity for Zoom/Slack/Github.

I would love to see Elixir based solution just to see how much performance can
be squeezed out of it, whatsapp seems to handle huge load just fine

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gverrilla
This reads to me big infrastructural problems in internet.

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raybb
Twitter link that bypasses paywall:
[https://t.co/WJHwemmfVl?amp=1](https://t.co/WJHwemmfVl?amp=1)

Archve.is link: [https://archive.is/N00i5](https://archive.is/N00i5)

This got me thinking what would it take to build a decent collaborative editor
that would work for hundreds of people.

~~~
jkinudsjknds
It's more likely that a real time editor for spreadsheets just doesn't make
sense for more than a few people.

The low hanging fruit would be adding a read-only view of a static copy,
because that's what people actually needed.

