Social Movements Are Pushing Google Sheets to the Breaking Point

Re:Social Movements Are Pushing Google Sheets to the Breakin... by ISL on Thursday August 06, 2020 @11:45AM (#24071987)

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.

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Re:Social Movements Are Pushing Google Sheets to the Breakin... by spacehunt on Thursday August 06, 2020 @12:49PM (#24072751)

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

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Re:Social Movements Are Pushing Google Sheets to the Breakin... by ISL on Thursday August 06, 2020 @12:58PM (#24072874)

If those records could have an arbitrary/large number of fields, that would suffice for our foreseeable needs. We're at ~6,000 individual entries at the moment and do not expect a 10x jump at this time. Our efforts now center on updates to and removals from our public map.

Airtable-wise, I'm parroting our devs on the subject. We had perpetual/nascent plans for an Airtable migration (and did so when FindTheMakers came to life) which have been tabled for now. We believe we'll make it to sunset on Sheets, but just barely.

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Re:Social Movements Are Pushing Google Sheets to the Breakin... by arthurcolle on Thursday August 06, 2020 @02:42PM (#24074101)

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?

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Re:Social Movements Are Pushing Google Sheets to the Breakin... by spacehunt on Thursday August 06, 2020 @03:14PM (#24074413)

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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Re:Social Movements Are Pushing Google Sheets to the Breakin... by raybb on Thursday August 06, 2020 @03:02PM (#24074294)

Have you heard of or tried https://cryptpad.fr/index.html or https://ethercalc.net/ ?

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

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