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.

▲

charlieflowers 4 hours ago | parent | next [-]

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

	▲	VadimPR 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Can it work with comments in sheets as well? When I looked into it, that seemed like a limitation.

▲

yabutlivnWoods 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

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.

▲

beepdyboop 3 hours ago | parent | next [-]

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

	▲	mbreese 3 hours ago \| parent \| next [-]
		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...
	▲	yabutlivnWoods 3 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		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

▲

intended 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

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

▲

buccal 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

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.

	▲	darkwater 2 hours ago \| parent \| next [-]
		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.
	▲	devmor 3 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		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.

▲

AznHisoka 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

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

▲

killerdhmo 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

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