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Comment by arjie | Hacker News Reader

I’ve always found it unbelievable how bad Gemini’s Google Sheets interaction is. Copying the sheets into Claude and then modifying them there and copying them back actually outperforms it.

Nowadays I just make single-purpose websites with Claude Code because Google Sheets has such poor AI integration and is outrageously tedious to edit.

They had all the parts and I have a subscription and it still does terrible things like prompt me to use pandas after exporting as a CSV. It will mention some cell and then can’t read it. It can’t edit tables so they just get overwritten with other tables it generates.

It reminds me of something a friend told me: he heard that Google employees do dogfood their products; some even multiple times every year. There’s no way anyone internal uses Sheets even that often.

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I'm having great luck having Claude Code generate, read, and update spreadsheets by writing Python code that uses gspread.

Can it work with comments in sheets as well? When I looked into it, that seemed like a limitation.

You mean cell notes? If so, perfectly well, yes.

It also works fine with Ruby and the "caxlsx" gem. Codex works fine with it as also.

Surprisingly even small models can do this quite well. I have Sonnet on a claw-like generate something based on my emails, airbnb receipts, and so on, and it was perfect and it could edit fields and whatnot, but the Gemini tool can't do anything.

My local models interact with Sheets exclusively over the API with Python scripts I been curating for years

Given how well the API works, that we are discussing Googlers, my guess is that's how they dog food their services. Programmers don't get hired by Google for mouse skills.

The GUI is for spot checking results, final presentation.

If you're sitting there point-n-clicking everything into place perhaps consider you are doing it wrong.

That sounds like an extremely narrow use case, compared to what the vast majority of Sheets users will be comfortable with

At the same time, it makes some sense... the programmers for a system aren't always the best users of a system. So if you're expecting them to dogfood their own system (Google Sheets), you might find that they test/interact with the system primarily through the API and not the GUI.

I have no idea if they do or not, but it's a plausible explanation...

Use case feels like the wrong term.

Do you mean restricted workflow? Googles APIs are pretty much 1:1 to the GUI

And using Python makes it trivial to copy-paste out of files and other APIs with one run of Python

Versus all the fiddling in browser tabs with a mouse, it actually affords an incredibly wide set of options to quickly collate and format data

How? This argument would make sense if sheets wasn’t targeted at a general audience.

I tried it the other day to work on some exported CSVs when doing my taxes. I was finally able to get it to do what I wanted, but it was definitely an exercise, feeling like I was talking to Chat GPT from a couple of years ago. (as in a really smart but easily distracted and confused child)

You should try MS Copilot which uses open source Python libraries to interact with Office file formats.

The libraries themselves are OK, but MS uses them stupidly. If you want to fill out some form in DOCX or XSLX format you will get broken formatting. And this is from Office company.

I recently experimented with trying to generate a passable slide deck from a script and outline I had written beforehand. The ChatGPT integration built into Powerpoint was abysmally bad. Like to the point it was embarrassing as a product.

Claude one-shot something with a Python script that was pretty okay.

Obviously. Because they didn't train the model on proprietary MS code. Which is bad but also good in some way, as it might force MS to support better their formats in the open source world.

Yeah, the Sheets integration is weird. It's usually ok when it wants to place something down the first time. But then it seems incapable of making any changes to it. Or even acknowledging the data in the sheet. What's up with that?

I love Sheets, but I dont care for using Gemini to interact with Sheets. It seems like a recipe for disaster. Do I really want it to muck around with thousands of rows and no intuitive way to diff its changes? Nope, sticking with basic Sheets

I mean, you're wrong. As a Xoogler, everything was in Sheets. Our roadmap was in Sheets. It's more they don't care.

This combined with the other guy saying they use Sheets through the API really makes for some of the funniest imagery. “Dave, did you finish that ticket to make the button blue?”

“Oh yeah, mate, give me a second to just whip up a script and set that task to complete. Do you remember if it was B729 or C624 that I should change?”

“It’s B729. But change the script to use ‘completed’ all right?”

“Yeah, give me a minute. Just need to spin up a Google project and activate the Sheets API (New). Now let me just get credentials. Got it. Yeah, now let me get Gemini to fix up the script. All right. Looking good. Shall I run it?”

“Yeah, lgtm”

“Done”

“Good process, guys. Velocity is at an all time high. Cell B729 is set to ‘completed’ as we planned.”

Agreed; I was also shocked by how limited it was. Same with the Slides integration.

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