Social Movements Are Pushing Google Sheets to the Breaking Point

For a crisis-response, an approach may reach maximum impact within days and really only be needed for a short duration (a week to a month). Migrating a system with intense user/volunteer churn (and keeping two databases synced as you transition) can be tricky. Handling permissioning at the same time is also a challenge.

At FindTheMasks, we expected the government to have supply chains and epidemiological response (testing/contact tracing) together within two or three weeks. When that didn't happen, we kept bolting on new tools and strategies to double the lifetime of the endeavor, expecting the government to get its poop in a group by then. 20 weeks later, supply chains are somewhat improved, though the entire situation is compromised by the lack of overwhelming success at the epidemiological scale.

I haven't used either before but cryptpad seems solid. Here's a demo sheet https://cryptpad.fr/sheet/#/2/sheet/edit/DirOb8rZr+6gfi5PCrS...

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.

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.

It's a flippant answer, sure, but spreadsheets are the index cards, sticky notes, and yarn approach to data organization. Certainly they are easy and approachable to use, but any sufficiently complex data set in general is going to be more "chaotic mind corkboard mess" than "organized".

Spreadsheets are very useful data hammer, but not all data is a nail; to borrow another aphorism.

That said, there's a wide gulf in the general user approachability between spreadsheet applications and more bespoke/"better" data organization options. Decades of experiences and mistakes learned from tools like DB2, FoxPro, and Access have shown us we have a hard time finding an "easy medium". AirTable thinks they have some modern ideas. Microsoft's PowerApps teams have their own modern approaches (and as almost the direct the inheritors of FoxPro/Access, presumably the most experience to learn from). Simon Willison's work with Datasette (SQLite DBs wrapped in simple view/management webpages) has had some interesting ideas. Though I don't think any one approach will solve it, it might take a whole shelf of tools, and at the end of the day maybe as a species we'll never have as clean of a user experience as the worst spreadsheet.

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.

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