But I like Google Sheets (simple UI, synchronizes between computers, free/affordable).
Have any of you had good experiences with a similar product but from another smaller company? (Like replacing Google Analytics with Plausible/Fathom/etc.)? E.g. a spreadsheet product from a small company costing $5-$10/month, something like that?
Thanks in advance!
Luicky, I can avoid all those tools mostly. I feel sad for those who cannot.
Personally, I use Gnumeric for Win32. Its old, but it does the job for me.
Use PowerQuery and PowerPivot for a few months and then try to go to Google Sheets, LibreOffice, Gnumeric, or any of the other supposed replacements.
It's like comparing the Gimp to Photoshop, except that I might be being unfair to the Gimp in this situation.
There is just a need to use the more complex features to do things and that can also show how changing a variable affects the overall analysis. I can't give people a python script or jupyter notebook and tell them to do x or y or z.
I can recreate all my calculations in excel, using python, with the same graphs and visuals, and give them instructions on what cells relate to what variables that affect the analysis so they can experiment for themselves.
With Google sheets, LibreOffice, etc., I haven't seen that kind of functionality.
That video changed my entire outlook (punny) on Excel. Before, I was of the opinion that, "a spreadsheet app is a spreadsheet app". But, no. Excel is insanely complex and capable. After a few years of Excel, I have a really difficult time using anything else.
I appreciate this wasn't one of my requirements in my original post, but is there a way to view or even edit Excel files on a phone? Not that I use that feature of Google Sheets much (the iPhone app is one of the least usable and worst apps in any category I've ever used) but it's nice to have in a pinch.
(I bought a Nokia Windows Phone back in the day, 10 years ago now I guess, and I was excited to hear it came with Excel! But I think I never got it to work.)
It is actually (https://www.icloud.com/numbers) and the parity with the desktop app is pretty much one to one.
OnlyOfffice is also self-hostable as a web app for a cloud alternative to Google Sheets.
Filebrowser is a self-hostable alternative to Google Drive.
There's a pull request open to integrate OnlyOffice with Filebrowser for self-hosted google-drive + google docs.
If you don't want to self-host, you can get a NextCloud storage share from Hetzner.
Runs on my Android device, auto backing up photos and videos. I've been running this for over a year - it's great.
[0] https://ente.io/
Maybe try airtable instead of Google sheets
You are letting very valuable data reside primarily on someone else’s computers. It is harder to backup, migrate, etc.
Why not use open office and some type of cloud sync? You are in control of the data. With open formats you can even switch software as you want while keeping your data unaffected.
> Why not use ... cloud sync
If you have your openoffice files just sitting unencrypted in s3 or Dropbox, this is no different
* Anything that's shared will have the same issues with data. Plus it forces other users to join some product they've never heard of.
* Local hosting would require time that would probably be better to spend elsewhere.
* Google Sheets is extremely mature and stable.