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