The Right-Enough Tool for the Job

In 2024, I read Nikhil Suresh's "I Will F'ing Dropkick You If You Use that Spreadsheet" and I'm probably due for a drop-kicking. I've taught myself some other languages and methods, but the spreadsheet is just so versatile!

Wrestler making a flying kick at another. The kick-receiver's head has been replaced by a spreasheet.
What I deserve. Collage information below.

I've written about many of my spreadsheet endeavors, including ones that talked to other, nominally "smarter" systems:

Case Study: Hipster PDA replacement

Most recently, I was re-designing my personal to-do list tracking: back when I was laid off in March 2025, I went for physical and tactile: I used business cards to create my own "Hipster PDA" (credit to Merlin Mann). Each action (or small family of actions) got its own business card, with the cards I needed to complete that day or the next carried on my person and the rest in an organizer sorted by date. It worked for a while, but I began to crave something that didn't rely on me getting back to my organizer daily-ish.

I wanted a simple database of actions, notes, due dates, etc., which I could summarize into running "today" and "next 7 days" lists. I needed to be able to access this on my phone at a minimum (other computers preferred but not required). This is a perfect example of what Suresh warned about: the "spreadsheet" part of it is only because I want a database and something to host my macro code.

I decided on Google Sheets anyway. If I was using my laptop, I might have hosted something locally, but I wanted cloud-based and I already had Google Workspace (i.e. a more-private version of Google). I drafted up the first module's App Script / JavaScript earlier this week and ditched my business cards. Could I have found somewhere that would cheaply and securely host a database and a few forms to send/receive data? Yes. Was I willing to research hosts, sign up for a new account, and dust off my very rusty SQL to make that happen? I was not.

Case Study: Network Feeds

I use the internet in some unusual ways and homebrew my way through them. A year ago, I might have either checked every feed manually or figured out how to make a spreadsheet host some code (Microsoft VBA or Google Apps Script) to run those feed-checkers. I can proudly tell Suresh that I avoided that temptation. I've hosted standalone Google Apps Script / JavaScript modules that now:

  • Check my email spam folder sends me a daily email of spam senders and subject lines. I wanted this because very few emails make it to my spam folder and some emails go there in error.
  • Pull my son's school news feed and send me a daily digest email
  • Monitor a shared Google document that I don't own and send me an email when it updates
  • On this very site, dynamically create a page listing every article published to-date. For some reason, Blogger doesn't have this built-in?

I have several other standalone projects in my ambitions list (now tracked in that Google Sheets file) that I'll sit down and code one day. So adding JavaScript and somewhere to host it has significantly expanded my non-spreadsheet options.

Conclusions

Suresh's original article seems to have been prompted by seeing too many spreadsheets that became embedded as the source data for gigantic swaying towers of computation and analysis. I've never had mine become so foundational to automated systems (although spreadsheets feeding spreadsheets forever has happened).

I know that the spreadsheet is often not the ideal path, but it tends to be quicker and more familiar to put something in the hands of the end-users as quickly as possible. And in the case of my new to-do list tracker, they have the advantage of already being available without buying and learning a new piece of software. So I am aware of the risks and don't always use them, but sometimes spreadsheets are the right-enough tool for the job, and I'm willing to accept a few drop-kicks as the cost.

Collage from Little Beaver and Fuzzy Cupid from the Oregon Herald and News October 29, 1952 (public domain) and screenshot from Microsoft Excel.

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