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Might as well post this here because I don’t see Sharepoint discussed here often. I love-hate Sharepoint. I love that lists have brought colleagues into really

by ics 4y ago

Might as well post this here because I don’t see Sharepoint discussed here often. I love-hate Sharepoint. I love that lists have brought colleagues into really considering how to store, manipulate, present data in a way that’s more rich than a spreadsheet with clever formatting. At my work we set up a Sharepoint site for each project, ostensibly to manage documents but I see it as a way to create project-as-an-app, where constraints and workflows can be built with minimal effort and used without special tools, just a good mind for data interfaces. Not without its headaches for sure, but I would be very disappointed to lose its power as a non-developer who still wrangles lots of information. What I wonder is what alternatives are out there, open source or otherwise which are similarly flexible? Airtable seems similar for some situations but opinionated. FileMaker feels pretty niche and quite expensive to host. What draws me to Sharepoint Lists is that it feels like a backend and fronted at the same time, so it’s easy to experiment with near instant feedback.

prepend 4y ago
I don’t like SharePoint lists very much because they are hard to work with outside of SharePoint. I’d rather just have an excel spreadsheet so I can “detach” it from SharePoint and email it around. Compare it to airtable as far as usability. I’d rather just store data untyped in json and use it with anything.
- bombcar 4y ago
  This is the reality - people are so burned into "file based" thinking that anything outside it really hurts their brains. Multiplayer powerpoint that apparently uses Sharepoint as the backend somehow is pretty useful, I'll grant that.
  - prepend 4y ago
    For me, it’s that SharePoint is so bad, I’d rather be file based than use it for data management. PowerPoint and even word works pretty well. But data sucks on SharePoint.
- ics 4y ago
  Everything Sharepoint is kludgy once you try to step outside it’s domain. I was surprised recently that Power Automate has a built in JSON parser, but CSV is by a third party. Still, I wouldn’t say it’s overly onerous if getting things into JSON or a spreadsheet are all you need. Very common for people building Power BI dashboards, or using the list to construct API queries to other systems. Weird example, but you can build what is effectively a DSL, so users can create queries and workflows just by creating list items with the available options, which can then be translated into code. “Stupid Sharepoint Tricks” but it’s nice because they’re self documenting, come with authoring history and access control, and doesn’t seem scary to some users.
- gompertz 4y ago
  I have to ask this here... Because I have the same annoyance with SharePoint Lists. While you can import a sharepoint list into Excel and refresh as you desire... You actually can't edit in Excel and push it back to sharepoint. I wish it was bidirectional. If anyone knows of a way or even a 3rd party app that allows this please let me know. Ideally I would expect third party tool to be similar to a database explorer /navigator where you can CRUD - but this doesn't seem to exist.
  - CharlesW 4y ago
    > If anyone knows of a way or even a 3rd party app that allows this please let me know. Potential commercial solution: https://www.synchronizer-for-excel-and-sharepoint.com/ https://www.synchronizer-for-excel-and-sharepoint.com/
  - faeriechangling 4y ago
    I will say if you want to get your hands dirty look into Power Automate. Also look into powershell, pnpsharepoint, and importexcel. This sort of integration isn’t impossible to DIY but it will take a lot of effort to make the first such integration. I’m going to say right away though many processes I’ve seen involving excel spreadsheets and SharePoint are inane managerisms which should never be automated and instead should be purged with fire. LOTS of fire.
  - ics 4y ago
    Completely agree that this should be a seamless experience but unfortunately it's not there. As faeriechangling said, you can start with Power Automate and do a lot of dirty work with Powershell but the amount of effort is annoying especially if you hit a wall in your organization (e.g. in my case Power Automate is fine, but there's no way I'm getting PnP). The dumbed down version is to use the "edit in grid view" feature of lists, which happens to make copy/pasting cells and rows between Sharepoint and Excel easy. I've done this before to make bulk changes when any additional effort isn't worth it.
    - gompertz 4y ago
      Yeah, while I myself can deal with Power Automate / Powershell, the average company layman user still can't even do an index match formula, so there's no way they are going to understand anything that complex. I've done what you have done and demonstrated the pasting into grid view. But this requires a perfect placement of the cursor and also the slow as f*ck row-by-row validation+commit to the database is outright comedic.
- mr_toad 4y ago
  > I’d rather just have an excel spreadsheet so I can “detach” it from SharePoint and email it around. “Hey Bob, where are the latest numbers?” “It’s in Numbersv4Final.xlsx “ “So what’s in Numbersv4Final2.xlsx?” “I think that’s the version Jane was working on. “I see a Numbersv4Final_Jane.xlsx “, is that based on Final or Final2?” “Ask Jane?” “Jane quit last week. She said she if she was going to work in a circus it might as well be a literal one.”
  - prepend 4y ago
    “hey Bob, where are the latest numbers?” “Here’s the link to the excel with those numbers.” “Thanks Bob, you’re the best.” OneDrive has versioning. Renaming excel files is for noobs. (Btw, I don’t like Excel, I’d rather put data small enough to fit in excel in git, but I like Excel better than SharePoint)
    - WorldMaker 4y ago
      OneDrive for Business is just SharePoint and the file versioning is sort of based on Lists behind the scenes. It's a weird game of turtles all the way down.
- faeriechangling 4y ago
  > I’d rather just have an excel spreadsheet so I can “detach” it from SharePoint and email it around. Please don’t. You’re replacing a gunshot wound with stage 4 brain cancer. Outlook is one of the few things that is a worse filesystem than SharePoint. Use a SMB share or something please just stop the attachment madness.
  - prepend 4y ago
    How do you work on files in a disconnected way (where an smb share wouldn’t work)?
    - faeriechangling 4y ago
      SharePoint :). Use Dropbox or something if you’re a renegade.
shubb 4y ago
Mabe also Notion's embedded databases (tables) - it's a wiki, and you can embed a table in your page which you can interact with - but that table is actually a view on a 'database' (linked tables) you have created. You can achieve quite a lot with it, and it's simple enough that most people can use it.
- ics 4y ago
  You’re right, I had forgotten while leaving my comment but it’s the closest that I can think of. I haven’t used it extensively since the official API became a thing so perhaps worth revisiting. I do wish Notion had more control over formatting, in the way that Sharepoint let’s you do all kinds of tricks with JSON formatting schema. The ability to flip between different views (list, card, calendar, etc.) is great.
savolai 4y ago
I have no experience with SharePoint lists. But from what it sounds like: I'd love to see a comparison with Notion databases as that seems to me to be the UX hallmark of user accessible relational database functionality. Edit: noticed this is already discussed in another reply here. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33268245 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33268245

by ics 4y ago

prepend 4y ago

I don’t like SharePoint lists very much because they are hard to work with outside of SharePoint. I’d rather just have an excel spreadsheet so I can “detach” it from SharePoint and email it around. Compare it to airtable as far as usability. I’d rather just store data untyped in json and use it with anything.

bombcar 4y ago
This is the reality - people are so burned into "file based" thinking that anything outside it really hurts their brains. Multiplayer powerpoint that apparently uses Sharepoint as the backend somehow is pretty useful, I'll grant that.
- prepend 4y ago
  For me, it’s that SharePoint is so bad, I’d rather be file based than use it for data management. PowerPoint and even word works pretty well. But data sucks on SharePoint.
ics 4y ago
Everything Sharepoint is kludgy once you try to step outside it’s domain. I was surprised recently that Power Automate has a built in JSON parser, but CSV is by a third party. Still, I wouldn’t say it’s overly onerous if getting things into JSON or a spreadsheet are all you need. Very common for people building Power BI dashboards, or using the list to construct API queries to other systems. Weird example, but you can build what is effectively a DSL, so users can create queries and workflows just by creating list items with the available options, which can then be translated into code. “Stupid Sharepoint Tricks” but it’s nice because they’re self documenting, come with authoring history and access control, and doesn’t seem scary to some users.
gompertz 4y ago
I have to ask this here... Because I have the same annoyance with SharePoint Lists. While you can import a sharepoint list into Excel and refresh as you desire... You actually can't edit in Excel and push it back to sharepoint. I wish it was bidirectional. If anyone knows of a way or even a 3rd party app that allows this please let me know. Ideally I would expect third party tool to be similar to a database explorer /navigator where you can CRUD - but this doesn't seem to exist.
- CharlesW 4y ago
  > If anyone knows of a way or even a 3rd party app that allows this please let me know. Potential commercial solution: https://www.synchronizer-for-excel-and-sharepoint.com/ https://www.synchronizer-for-excel-and-sharepoint.com/
- faeriechangling 4y ago
  I will say if you want to get your hands dirty look into Power Automate. Also look into powershell, pnpsharepoint, and importexcel. This sort of integration isn’t impossible to DIY but it will take a lot of effort to make the first such integration. I’m going to say right away though many processes I’ve seen involving excel spreadsheets and SharePoint are inane managerisms which should never be automated and instead should be purged with fire. LOTS of fire.
- ics 4y ago
  Completely agree that this should be a seamless experience but unfortunately it's not there. As faeriechangling said, you can start with Power Automate and do a lot of dirty work with Powershell but the amount of effort is annoying especially if you hit a wall in your organization (e.g. in my case Power Automate is fine, but there's no way I'm getting PnP). The dumbed down version is to use the "edit in grid view" feature of lists, which happens to make copy/pasting cells and rows between Sharepoint and Excel easy. I've done this before to make bulk changes when any additional effort isn't worth it.
  - gompertz 4y ago
    Yeah, while I myself can deal with Power Automate / Powershell, the average company layman user still can't even do an index match formula, so there's no way they are going to understand anything that complex. I've done what you have done and demonstrated the pasting into grid view. But this requires a perfect placement of the cursor and also the slow as f*ck row-by-row validation+commit to the database is outright comedic.
mr_toad 4y ago
> I’d rather just have an excel spreadsheet so I can “detach” it from SharePoint and email it around. “Hey Bob, where are the latest numbers?” “It’s in Numbersv4Final.xlsx “ “So what’s in Numbersv4Final2.xlsx?” “I think that’s the version Jane was working on. “I see a Numbersv4Final_Jane.xlsx “, is that based on Final or Final2?” “Ask Jane?” “Jane quit last week. She said she if she was going to work in a circus it might as well be a literal one.”
- prepend 4y ago
  “hey Bob, where are the latest numbers?” “Here’s the link to the excel with those numbers.” “Thanks Bob, you’re the best.” OneDrive has versioning. Renaming excel files is for noobs. (Btw, I don’t like Excel, I’d rather put data small enough to fit in excel in git, but I like Excel better than SharePoint)
  - WorldMaker 4y ago
    OneDrive for Business is just SharePoint and the file versioning is sort of based on Lists behind the scenes. It's a weird game of turtles all the way down.
faeriechangling 4y ago
> I’d rather just have an excel spreadsheet so I can “detach” it from SharePoint and email it around. Please don’t. You’re replacing a gunshot wound with stage 4 brain cancer. Outlook is one of the few things that is a worse filesystem than SharePoint. Use a SMB share or something please just stop the attachment madness.
- prepend 4y ago
  How do you work on files in a disconnected way (where an smb share wouldn’t work)?
  - faeriechangling 4y ago
    SharePoint :). Use Dropbox or something if you’re a renegade.

shubb 4y ago

Mabe also Notion's embedded databases (tables) - it's a wiki, and you can embed a table in your page which you can interact with - but that table is actually a view on a 'database' (linked tables) you have created. You can achieve quite a lot with it, and it's simple enough that most people can use it.

ics 4y ago
You’re right, I had forgotten while leaving my comment but it’s the closest that I can think of. I haven’t used it extensively since the official API became a thing so perhaps worth revisiting. I do wish Notion had more control over formatting, in the way that Sharepoint let’s you do all kinds of tricks with JSON formatting schema. The ability to flip between different views (list, card, calendar, etc.) is great.

savolai 4y ago

I have no experience with SharePoint lists. But from what it sounds like: I'd love to see a comparison with Notion databases as that seems to me to be the UX hallmark of user accessible relational database functionality. Edit: noticed this is already discussed in another reply here. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33268245 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33268245