Record macros in Google Sheets | Hacker News Reader

Record macros in Google Sheets

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40 pointsthenipper7 comments

For me the killer feature of excel is RTD's

https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/help/285339/how-to-creat...

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.

I've done REST API calls with Google sheets. I don't have the code right off, but it even ran in the background every so often too.

Google Sheets/App Scripts will let you do anything you want pretty much. You can call REST api endpoints, query some DB to bring in the "real time data", many other ways to do it.

Pretty easy compared to Excel.

Oh.. and Microsoft's new 365 platform.. doesn't support Macros AT ALL. Nor RTD, unless you write your own excel 365 add on. Have fun with that.

My favorite feature, export a workbook with many sheets to html from google sheets, it's formatted beautifully in HTML. Now go to Excel and do that same. It never gets it right and is so ugly.

Google sheets, feature wise, is kicking the crap out of Microsoft now. People in the finance world will see this and the transition will/is happening.

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.

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.

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...) have critical Excel functionality like macros since 2008.

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.

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