Why I only use Google sheets
30 Sep, 2025
To cut things short, always use the easiest solution to solve a particular problem and once that solution does not work for the business anymore reassess what the new requirements are and either try enhance the current solution or find an alternative that better solve the problem. In my case the easiest solution is often creating a new Google sheet.
I entered the workforce about 9 months ago and my optimism for building new tools and services that help the small starting up business I work for has all vanished. I work in an environment that changes every 2 months or so, as my boss finds a new business venture she wants to enter. This has me starting and stopping quite a few projects that could have been solved in an afternoon with a quick Google Sheet.
I have listed a few examples below of some of the projects I have wasted time on instead of making a Google Sheet:
I spent 2 months designing and making an admin panel to manage and track incoming cargo for the business. This panel was supposed to help the business categorise and better manage packages and customer data. This admin panel was used twice and never again. A Google Sheet could have been easily used for this and is currently being used for this task. Three weeks were spent creating an MVP for a quote system that automatically calculated the duty and taxes for people ordering certain goods. Zimbabwean taxes and duties are often very complex and having our customers know exactly what to pay would create a better customer journey and make the process faster since we would not have to wait on our third party duty processing company to reply to us on every customer inquiry. In the end, we saw one of our competitors tax and duty breakdown table and we just copied it and put it in a Google Sheet. Spent 2 months researching, having meetings (often > 1hr long) and looking for a good CRM to use for the business. I would sit down compare and contrast different feature`s and prices for all the different CRMs we were looking into. We ended up using the free version of Oddo, that is not used that much anyway within the business. To my surprise a few weeks ago i noticed that Google Sheets has a CRM template built into it.
I'm not saying that making a Google Sheet is the best solution to every problem but often times in my situation it is. I usually end up in situations were I never know the full scope of the problem until we start doing the actual work.
This is not to say that we do not need to plan out a project. The team should discuss workflows and information they might need but until we start doing the actual work we do not know full scope of the problem.
Once the full scope of the problem is known then we can start creating or enhancing the solutions we have. This helps because you do not end up being stuck with an extra workload that in the best case does not require all the features you are adding and in the worst case spending time on a project that will fail. So it is in your best interest to use the most basic solution to solve a problem.
Doing the smallest and easiest solution to a problem as a way to get to know the full scope and then iterating after that if needs be is by far the best solution (for me).
There are some caveats to this approach, I know a few organisation that have a thousand row spreadsheets that keep track of all their business transactions and employee information.
Creating a Google Sheet only works in situations were we do not know the full scope of the problem. Personally, I'm still new to this and learning when the best solution is making a Google Sheet or not. I just want to save people's time and effort and not have them build something that will never be used. But like all advice, think carefully about your own situation before committing a lot of time and effort especially in a business setting. It is perfectly fine for you to build useless programs and software in your spare time, that's the whole fun of it.