So many dumb business processes rely on an Excel doc somewhere, or a stupid manual email somewhere else. But with Flow I've seen just a single smarty-pants able to fully streamline an entire department one rule at a time. They don't need to get permission to bring in a new logo - it's part of Office, they can just do it. And no one has to get dragged into it kicking and screaming - you want to work off of an Excel file? Fine! It's still there!
It feels like a hit of Agile steroids for an older organization.
My team does analytics consulting work for large multi-agency marketing campaigns, and I used Flow and a shared mailbox to create sanity around managing the constant flood of daily/weekly/monthly data snapshots that get emailed and have to be synthesized and combined for end reporting/analysis.
I was also able to use Flow and PowerBI to duct tape together a "starter data lake" architecture for our marketing clients. It's been a wild success with clients, due in part because of it's price (in context to their expectations for traditional "data lake pitches") but even more so due to the fact that it gets rubber stamped through any IT review thanks to being all part of Microsoft. It fits most clients workflows and data volumes, and seamlessly transitions to a true data lake by pulling in Azure services as needs mature.
Most marketing departments are swimming in data but pretty lacking in their access to technical and process/operations resources to truly manage and leverage it. Flow has been a fantastic tool to introduce structured data management and automation for these clients, as it's low cost enough to slide under the radar, already implicitly allowed software as part of their Office 365 license, and gives them tangible results to show when asking for more budget to develop/mature it further. It's far from my favorite stack to use, but it's good enough to get the job done and breezes through all of the checks and objections and red tape that would make virtually any other stack dead on arrival.
I'm torn between two worlds. One side applauds the grass roots based solutions and the JFDI attitude. The other side is concerned that these solutions becomes widely used, de facto production, and problems upstream ends up breaking the output. On error, hopefully fails loudly but subtle problems could creep in. If the reports are consumed by other automation, the problem spreads rapidly.
Ideally the IT department would take a step back, assess what the users (you the stakeholder) needs are, and provide the solutions. Better Agile.
Using the successes to drive more development and operations budget is the way to go.
Plus it wont be randomly cancelled when Google decides they got bored with it after several years of neglecting it first.
I've always wondered why Google is so bad at keeping various services going. Your comment caused me to reflect that Google hires a lot of smart people. Smart people tend to get bored with working on the same thing and want to work on new shiny things. Could it be that the smart people at Google do a bang up job of creating new services, but then get bored and move on to something new, leaving the previous service to slowly die and eventually get abandoned?
People helpers are good tech support: "I'm sure I can help you. I've done this a thousand times."
Problem solvers are not: "I'm going out of my mind. I've done this a thousand times!"
It's more complicated than that, with people falling somewhere on an X-Y graph, some skewing one way and some the other.
Also, I used to think that all the values were positive. But there are those who not only don't help, they make the situation worse. And those who can't solve the problem, but make that worse, too.
What would be nice is if Google were to have someone who scored more on the "people helper" part. "Yes, this is older and boring but it's what people are used to and we're going to maintain it."
Google cancels stuff. A lot? Maybe but they have a lot of products.
But it's not without logic and it's much less likely to effect paid products and core services. How many parts of Docs/Drive have been cancelled? How many GCP components?
Next time someone is about to post another "Google cancels everything!" comment I hope they might pause and think whether it's plausible in this specific case. (And maybe pause to consider whether they are adding anything new to the debate or just repeating the same point that's been made a thousand times previously)
It also has capabilities that allows you to connect to any REST API - look up Custom Connectors.
Finally, if you don't have Office 365, you can sign up for a free account using your personal Outlook / Microsoft account to test the waters.
Disclaimer: I work on Microsoft Flow and am very excited to see it here on YC.
The only reason they don't have more penetration into dev mindshare is because their tech stacks are generally in the dark ages (looking at you, BluePrism and Automation Anywhere!).
That said, I've been pretty happy with UiPath, both from an openness perspective and a technical one. They've got a free trial license to test drive it too, which is nice compared to the usual "Call us for a quote" sales BS.
https://www.uipath.com/developers/community-edition-download
If anyone wants to chat enterprise process automation, feel free to hit me on email. It's been my weird niche for the past few years. Username.co at gmail.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4EKWKJc4b4c
I've seen a handful of these over the last few years, but this one does look like it hit the right UI/UX spot.
It would be so much easier, if the us finally stopped using this middle-endian date format. It's logically flawed and too prone for misinterpretation. Further the US is the only country in the world to insist on using it. yyyy-mm-dd or dd-mm-yyyy are both fine (I actually prefer the first, though my country uses the latter) and logically consistent.
While they are at it, they could also switch to the metric system.
Granted, Flow is still in development but I could not recommend it for production or anything of importance. They are few possibilities for backup (the browser based packaging doesn't count), nor any kind of functionality for advanced administration. I know Flow does also target non-developer audiences, but that is not an excuse to skip basic features.
I think being able to model workflows is essential for companies that do not want to spend large amounts of money on custom solutions. They can really remove a lot of busywork. The lack of real competition amazes me. Everyone would profit from a good workflow engine.
So Flow is only good, because alternatives are basically absent.
What particular use-cases can it solve? E.g. is it easy to template Word/Excel document generation with it?
Is it just that you don't have to write any code to use Flow?
"just"? that seems like a massive selling point to me. If the people that are supposed to use the tool in a company are not technical (or not technical enough) it doesn't matter how good the tool is, the first check is "does it need programming skills"
And actually I’ve lost edits with just plain synchronization on an iPad. I was on a plane, I edited a document I had, putting a lot of effort into it, then when my plane landed and the Internet came back, my changes vanished with no history recorded.
It's like IFTTT/Zapier/Huginn, but by Microsoft. It has all the advanced scriptability you'd need, but it's still missing some of the best parts of those solutions.
Definitely cloud-centric, and reaches into on-premises data through an optional on-premises data connection agent.
You'd be surprised at how much you can do with it.
(edit: especially powerful if you're using SharePoint)
And then you get that one user who takes the collaborative document, downloads it to their desktop, then emails everyone a revision.
That's a sentence I never thought I would hear.
Pet peeve: it is impossible to do a wysiwyg document in Google docs, it will come out subtly different on almost every computer/browser combo and in the end will come out different again when exported as a PDF resulting in endless cycles of revisions.
then for sheets, being able to work in "apps script" is fantastic. apparently you can use typescript in excel with some third party tools but surely they all stink in some way, and won't product portable documents. and anyway, VB is ok enough and has its own strengths.
otherwise, Office completely blows away google apps.
Just seems like marketing to me.
And then Google ban your account for some random reason and you're suddenly barred from participating, your voice can no longer be heard, and who knows what happens to your existing contributions. I've not seen it happen first hand, but there are enough stories of people getting frozen out.
One alternative, which the Wikimedia community use, is Etherpad. It's ok for text editing but less polished.
People talk on HN about moral decisions about Google / Facebooke employees. Should that level of scrutiny apply to 3rd party plugin authors who help consolidate market share?
Every time there's a sob story that "Google killed my business by banning my Android app" there's a strong "your fault for relying on Google". But it seems like a blind spot when it comes to e.g. email and collaboration tools. Like Google's too big to fail.
While failure at a grand scale is probably unlikely at this point, I can totally see localised failure, such as a missed credit card payment or suspicious activity on an associated account causing absolute mayhem for an organisation.
For personal accounts, what happens if you create another account? It's also a big disruption, but "your voice can no longer be heard" seems exaggerated?
Let's say we're note-gathering at a conference about metadata formats for international science collaboration. Often we get remote participants who want to join the conversation, and selection bias says that they especially come from developing countries and can't afford to travel. Those constituencies may have vital information which will help to guide a standardization process for shared metadata.
If they are blocked, for whatever reason, they may be unable to contribute to the conversation. Maybe their missing voice means that metadata systems add another piece of systematic bias against them and further excludes them.
I don't know of any specific examples where this has happened, but the underpinnings are all true.
- visit https://myaccount.google.com/language
- click on (re-choose) English
- click on New Zealand as the 'sub-language'
should set your locale across the board, rather than doing it on a per-sheet basis. If it doesn't work, as a Canadian, I empathize with your troubles and apologize.
I'm interested whether this change will affect other Google products, in particular whether it messes up the operation of Google Assistant on my phone (possibly that can be overridden).
Cheers!
and setting date format there useful. Not sure if it's a universal setting like the previous, though.
1.) Employee creates a GDoc in a known, shared folder
2.) Application pulls all GDocs from this shared folder
3.) Application uses GDrive API to convert the GDoc to HTML
4.) HTML is displayed to the end user.
This proved to be an easy solution to having to involve a developer to fix a typo in a release note.
1- the API keys are only used on our servers and not the device, so no new worries about the key getting out and abused
2- we cache the results of the API calls for 5-10 minutes with Redis. So there's no worries about the quota or rate limits.
We've been doing this for about a year with 15,000 daily active users. When we publish a new release note roughly half read it within the first 24 hours. No issues to report.
i am having a hard time seeing myself using anything that google puts out. i have been burned way to many times.
the biggest ones? google reader, code and inbox (happening now).
sorry but it’s really hard to bet the farm on otherwise cool technology
For Steps 1 & 2 have you looked into generating markup and using Pandoc to convert to, e.g. Word files? https://pandoc.org/
By definition, credentials.json doesn't exist yet and this throws an error. Transcript below.
creds = None
if os.path.exists('token.pickle'):
...
# If there are no (valid) credentials available, let the user log in.
if not creds or not creds.valid:
if creds and creds.expired and creds.refresh_token:
...
else:
flow = InstalledAppFlow.from_client_secrets_file(
'credentials.json', SCOPES)
creds = flow.run_local_server()
$ sudo apt install python3-pip Reading package lists... Done Building dependency tree Reading state information... Done The following packages were automatically installed and are no longer required: grub-pc-bin libpython-all-dev libpython-dev libpython2.7 libpython2.7-dev python-all python-all-dev python-asn1crypto python-cffi-backend python-crcmod python-crypto python-cryptography python-dbus python-dev python-enum34 python-gi python-idna python-ipaddress python-keyring python-keyrings.alt python-secretstorage python-six python-wheel python-xdg python2.7-dev Use 'sudo apt autoremove' to remove them. The following NEW packages will be installed: python3-pip 0 upgraded, 1 newly installed, 0 to remove and 11 not upgraded. Need to get 114 kB of archives. After this operation, 599 kB of additional disk space will be used. Get:1 http://us-east4-c.gce.clouds.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu bionic-updates/universe amd64 python3-pip all 9.0.1-2.3~ubuntu1 [114 kB] Fetched 114 kB in 1s (175 kB/s) Selecting previously unselected package python3-pip. (Reading database ... 128010 files and directories currently installed.) Preparing to unpack .../python3-pip_9.0.1-2.3~ubuntu1_all.deb ... Unpacking python3-pip (9.0.1-2.3~ubuntu1) ... Setting up python3-pip (9.0.1-2.3~ubuntu1) ... Processing triggers for man-db (2.8.3-2ubuntu0.1) ...
$ pip3 install --upgrade google-api-python-client google-auth-httplib2 google-auth-oauthlib Collecting google-api-python-client Downloading https://files.pythonhosted.org/packages/55/e9/e8fb2e3a031cb6... (56kB) 100% || 61kB 3.1MB/s Collecting google-auth-httplib2 Using cached https://files.pythonhosted.org/packages/33/49/c814d6d438b823... Collecting google-auth-oauthlib Using cached https://files.pythonhosted.org/packages/46/df/d1f94ee2cffe5a... Collecting six<2dev,>=1.6.1 (from google-api-python-client) Using cached https://files.pythonhosted.org/packages/73/fb/00a976f728d0d1... Collecting httplib2<1dev,>=0.9.2 (from google-api-python-client) Using cached https://files.pythonhosted.org/packages/ce/ed/803905d670b52f... Collecting uritemplate<4dev,>=3.0.0 (from google-api-python-client) Downloading https://files.pythonhosted.org/packages/e5/7d/9d5a640c4f8bf2... Collecting google-auth>=1.4.1 (from google-api-python-client) Using cached https://files.pythonhosted.org/packages/4e/85/71b2dfbf5b4241... Collecting requests-oauthlib>=0.7.0 (from google-auth-oauthlib) Using cached https://files.pythonhosted.org/packages/c2/e2/9fd03d55ffb70f... Collecting cachetools>=2.0.0 (from google-auth>=1.4.1->google-api-python-client) Using cached https://files.pythonhosted.org/packages/39/2b/d87fc2369242bd... Collecting pyasn1-modules>=0.2.1 (from google-auth>=1.4.1->google-api-python-client) Using cached https://files.pythonhosted.org/packages/da/98/8ddd9fa4d84065... Collecting rsa>=3.1.4 (from google-auth>=1.4.1->google-api-python-client) Using cached https://files.pythonhosted.org/packages/02/e5/38518af393f7c2... Collecting oauthlib>=3.0.0 (from requests-oauthlib>=0.7.0->google-auth-oauthlib) Using cached https://files.pythonhosted.org/packages/16/95/699466b05b72b9... Collecting requests>=2.0.0 (from requests-oauthlib>=0.7.0->google-auth-oauthlib) Using cached https://files.pythonhosted.org/packages/7d/e3/20f3d364d6c8e5... Collecting pyasn1<0.5.0,>=0.4.1 (from pyasn1-modules>=0.2.1->google-auth>=1.4.1->google-api-python-client) Using cached https://files.pythonhosted.org/packages/7b/7c/c9386b82a25115... Collecting urllib3<1.25,>=1.21.1 (from requests>=2.0.0->requests-oauthlib>=0.7.0->google-auth-oauthlib) Using cached https://files.pythonhosted.org/packages/62/00/ee1d7de624db8b... Collecting certifi>=2017.4.17 (from requests>=2.0.0->requests-oauthlib>=0.7.0->google-auth-oauthlib) Using cached https://files.pythonhosted.org/packages/9f/e0/accfc1b56b57e9... Collecting chardet<3.1.0,>=3.0.2 (from requests>=2.0.0->requests-oauthlib>=0.7.0->google-auth-oauthlib) Using cached https://files.pythonhosted.org/packages/bc/a9/01ffebfb562e42... Collecting idna<2.9,>=2.5 (from requests>=2.0.0->requests-oauthlib>=0.7.0->google-auth-oauthlib) Using cached https://files.pythonhosted.org/packages/14/2c/cd551d81dbe152... Building wheels for collected packages: httplib2 Running setup.py bdist_wheel for httplib2 ... done Stored in directory: /home/asah/.cache/pip/wheels/6d/41/4b/2b369d6e2b7eaebcdd423516d3fb659c7658c16a2be8fd04ec Successfully built httplib2 Installing collected packages: six, httplib2, cachetools, pyasn1, pyasn1-modules, rsa, google-auth, google-auth-httplib2, uritemplate, google-api-python-client, oauthlib, urllib3, certifi, chardet, idna, requests, requests-oauthlib, google-auth-oauthlib Successfully installed cachetools-3.1.0 certifi-2018.11.29 chardet-3.0.4 google-api-python-client-1.7.8 google-auth-1.6.2 google-auth-httplib2-0.0.3 google-auth-oauthlib-0.2.0 httplib2-0.12.0 idna-2.8 oauthlib-3.0.1 pyasn1-0.4.5 pyasn1-modules-0.2.4 requests-2.21.0 requests-oauthlib-1.2.0 rsa-4.0 six-1.12.0 uritemplate-3.0.0 urllib3-1.24.1
$ python quickstart.py InstalledAppFlow.from_client_secrets_file()... Traceback (most recent call last): File "quickstart.py", line 47, in <module> main() File "quickstart.py", line 32, in main 'credentials.json', SCOPES) File "/home/asah/.local/lib/python2.7/site-packages/google_auth_oauthlib/flow.py", line 171, in from_client_secrets_file with open(client_secrets_file, 'r') as json_file: IOError: [Errno 2] No such file or directory: 'credentials.json'
$ cat quickstart.py from __future__ import print_function import pickle import os.path from googleapiclient.discovery import build from google_auth_oauthlib.flow import InstalledAppFlow from google.auth.transport.requests import Request
# If modifying these scopes, delete the file token.pickle. SCOPES = ['https://www.googleapis.com/auth/documents.readonly']
# The ID of a sample document. DOCUMENT_ID = '195j9eDD3ccgjQRttHhJPymLJUCOUjs-jmwTrekvdjFE'
def main(): """Shows basic usage of the Docs API. Prints the title of a sample document. """ creds = None # The file token.pickle stores the user's access and refresh tokens, and is # created automatically when the authorization flow completes for the first # time. if os.path.exists('token.pickle'): with open('token.pickle', 'rb') as token: creds = pickle.load(token) # If there are no (valid) credentials available, let the user log in. if not creds or not creds.valid: if creds and creds.expired and creds.refresh_token: creds.refresh(Request()) else: print("InstalledAppFlow.from_client_secrets_file()...") flow = InstalledAppFlow.from_client_secrets_file( 'credentials.json', SCOPES) creds = flow.run_local_server() # Save the credentials for the next run with open('token.pickle', 'wb') as token: pickle.dump(creds, token)
service = build('docs', 'v1', credentials=creds)
# Retrieve the documents contents from the Docs service.
document = service.documents().get(documentId=DOCUMENT_ID).execute()
print('The title of the document is: {}'.format(document.get('title')))
Read the document you linked: https://developers.google.com/docs/api/quickstart/python
Read directly above and below the giant blue "ENABLE THE GOOGLE DOCS API" button.
* You have to use server-side automation - which is unsupported, and probably even violates Microsoft's terms of use.
* It's tricky. I use a serialized message queue to generate documents.
* Microsoft was dang stupid to not support automation. Such lost opportunity. I doubt that Google's supporting automation is going to change Microsoft.
From the article:
> Some of the companies that built solutions based on the new API during the preview period include Zapier, Netflix, Mailchimp and Final Draft.
disclaimer, I work at Zapier
Google Docs already had an HTML import/export API, which allowed you to download a document, make changes, and save those changes back again. That would allow you to implement any kind of templating you like. This API just makes it slightly easier and more visible.
Yeah that's what APIs do. You can usually work with CURL requests/scraping too, but it always feels clunky and improvised, much like the method you are describing seems to me.
Making something easier means making it more accessible, means the tech based around these tools will advance faster, and that's good for everyone. It's not just a new bauble, well, except it's Google, but it will be very useful until they inevitably abandon it.
Tiny differences in html being sent seem to result in headers working or not, tables rendering differently and more.
> Google Docs already had an HTML import/export API, which allowed you to download a document, make changes, and save those changes back again.
I found that importing an export didn't result in the same looking document.
The upside to a system like that is, the authorization flow is abstracted completely out and handled by Google. You just pick from a dropdown as far as who you want to have access to the Web App URL, and you don't have to deal at all with setting up an OAuth flow.
1. https://developers.google.com/apps-script/
Business-oriented releases like this need to come with a guarantee of existence for X years (some reasonable number) if Google expects anyone to use this for business purposes -- especially any paid/G-suite version (or whatever their premium version is called this week). Even then, it'd be a tough sell, as simply not shutting off the servers doesn't mean they'll actually actively update and support it.
Google, an advertising company, is competing against Microsoft, a software company with its roots in this exact type of software and thousand of companies with piles of MS-specific macros and scripts and processes they've been working with since the 90s.
Half-assing it is not going to work, even if they have a free tier available.
I use Google Drive regularly for personal documents, and even for my one-person business, but I wouldn't dream of entrenching myself in it in such a way that operations could be disrupted if they decide to switch the servers off next week with two days warning.
Search isn't going away. Maps isn't going away. But everything else Google is subject to a shut off at any second. Gmail isn't going away either, but your specific account could, with no recourse or appeal or access to your data.
The question we should all be asking at the release of ANY new Google feature shouldn't be "does Google have the engineering talent to make this good?". Of course they do. If Google wanted to start making space rockets tomorrow they could. The right question is "does Google have incentive in the form of advertising revenue to keep working on this?"
I predict this is another feature that has already been abandoned as of this writing, with no further updates to come.
Google Sheets has had a reasonably good API for years.
[0] https://developers.google.com/apps-script/reference/document...
But it's really interesting to see how competitors evolve over time. Now HelloSign has been acquired by Dropbox, and Google Docs has launched their own document generation API.
It's like Henry Ford giving people who are looking for faster and more economical transportation an assembly line instead of a car. Here is why:
- Task automation, by definition is supposed to save time and money. By building a developer API, you still need developers (whose time costs more money!) to build and maintain your automations.
- The underlying document model itself cannot be accessed. So what they've made is some kind of HandleBarJS way of creating documents and filling them in.
I'm working on something in a similar space (https://afterclass.co) and we've had to build our own document model and automation handler to work around these two problems. Would be interesting to see how this pans out :)
Once you leave the simple use cases of just replacing tags it gets quite complicated, but you can build really complex documents that way [2].
[1] http://templater.info
[2] https://github.com/ngs-doo/templaterexamplesGoogledocs gets annoying.