I love the docs ability to create databases from my docs. That would be super useful for work and research activities.
this post was submitted on 16 Mar 2025
1158 points (99.1% liked)
Technology
66687 readers
4691 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related content.
- Be excellent to each other!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, this includes using AI responses and summaries. To ask if your bot can be added please contact a mod.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
- Accounts 7 days and younger will have their posts automatically removed.
Approved Bots
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
Right up until you are doing compliance and governance and you realize docs are actually a terrible terrible source of truth for any automated systems. We’re 3 years into a project at a healthcare company to rip google sheets and docs out of our apps and replacing them with Postgres, bigquery, dbt and dagster.
It’s simply not okay to have your database be something anyone with write access to a doc can fuck up a formula by accident on. Your medical bills being maintained by random formulas on dozens of linked spreadsheets maintained by hand by random people on different teams is part of why they are impossible to unwind. By the time someone audits it, it’s printing different numbers than when your bill was rendered and it’s version control doesn’t work to roll it back without breaking dozens of other things.
I'm in the engineering business. We have a PDM system that we check-in copies of component 3D models, PDF drawings and DOCs. Once your team has collaborated enough, you have a copy...once a week/day/hour depending on your preference. That way you can collaborate and keep frozen records and rev controlled documents.
Right. But you can’t do that in a live system like google docs. You can have a workflow to export copies, but the live doc is the one bigquery and linked docs utilize to function against your app. It’s actually a feature of the same tooling that makes using them like a database possible that causes it to not be versionable. So even if you export copies as you update it, you can’t move the system back to those copies without breaking other parts of the system.
Other systems for modeling data have better version control for running parallel versions of models if you need to recover how data had been constructed in an older state. It’s an incredibly bad idea to do this with Google docs at scale
load more comments
(3 replies)
It looks closer to the markdown style of formatting though, and I doubt it has page formatting, or other more advanced formatting, or extensions, or a large selection of fonts. Honestly, even though docs has pageless formatting now, most people don't use it when they should, making everything unnecessary harder to read, so this will be better in that regard at least. This is probably good enough for 95% of what people use Docs for, but I wouldn't call it a replacement.
I haven't used it because I don't have a French government account, so correct me if I'm wrong about any of that.
There is a public demo instance. The link and test credentials are on the GitHub page.
Can the UK get some of that?
If I can copy and paste with thought having to install the offline plugin, then I'm in.