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Monzo (online bank in UK) let you see all your transactions in a Google sheet (with some caveats e.g. interest earned is skipped). I wanted to make a total weal

Monzo (online bank in UK) let you see all your transactions in a Google sheet (with some caveats e.g. interest earned is skipped). I wanted to make a total wealth chart over all years. It's so damn complicated in Google sheets. In MS Excel I could simply make a pivot chart, apply any aggregation on days/weeks and be done with it. But with Sheets I had to make a new aggregate column, filter data in another new column, and make a chart on that. Your comment does explain that API is why they export to sheets and not excel but Google sheets is way behind in ease of use.

BillinghamJ 2y ago
Google Sheets can do that - https://officewheel.com/group-dates-in-pivot-table-google-sheets/ https://officewheel.com/group-dates-in-pivot-table-google-sh...
- smusamashah 2y ago
  This is the text book answer. Not something you can actually do on a live sheet with all transactions. If you want to use a different aggregate e.g. week instead of month or skip first year or something like that you will be making these columns all over again.
miki123211 2y ago
My bank just exports to CSV, which is trivially importable to Excel, Sheets, Pandas or whatever else you need.
- maxique 2y ago
  As I understand it, the appeal of Monzo's way is it's live updating rather than having to log in to some horribly outdated online banking portal and manually export
  - smusamashah 2y ago
    Yes exactly. The Google sheet is live. I couldn't just add a column in live sheet either. I had to copy the sheet using a formula so that its always up to date. And still had to use to other sheets. Chart is in the 4th sheet. In excel I would not have to do any of that.
homebrewer 2y ago
You're fine with Google seeing complete information about your income and spending? I'm not one of those truly paranoid, but this seems like a bit too much.
- diggan 2y ago
  That seems like the least "compromising" data, compared to other things we let them get. Imagine there are whole countries out there where income is public and accessible to anyone ;)
- pxeger1 2y ago
  What’s your risk model here? Google are not manually or automatically inspecting the contents of your spreadsheets in order to profile you and show you better-personalised ads. Not enough people have such a spreadsheet for it to be worth it for them, I’m sure - and they also probably already know approximately how wealthy you are. Unless you’re under investigation for fraud or something, I doubt the government could get much use out of being able to access your financial spreadsheets via Google compared to the information they already get directly from banks etc. So that only really leaves criminals (for whom I still can’t see a great incentive to read your spreadsheets), and I also don’t really think your Google account is much less secure than your computer’s local storage (if that’s the other place you would keep it)
  - mixmastamyk 2y ago
    We’ve learned over and over that tech companies do things which seemingly make no sense to us, but do to them. Not being able to imagine it is not sufficient. Nothing is deleted anymore as well, in hopes it will be useful later. That said I don’t see a huge risk here, unless combined with lots of other data. Would probably avoid though.
  - II2II 2y ago
    I simply want minimal exposure of my personal data since I don't want to go through life thinking about risk models. Not only is it time consuming, but my creative juices simply don't flow when it comes down to exploiting people (nor do I want them to flow in that direction).
flokie 2y ago
What about just plain old query() SQL i usually find the easiest vs. mucking around with pivot tables.
- Closi 2y ago
  SQL is fine if you don't want to play with the data interactively - but that's the real benefit of Pivot Tables. Things like drilling through, filtering/slicing, and then generating a graph, all in SaaS without having to run anything local.
  - smusamashah 2y ago
    Yes exactly, excel's Pivot tables and charts are more powerful.

BillinghamJ 2y ago

Google Sheets can do that - https://officewheel.com/group-dates-in-pivot-table-google-sheets/ https://officewheel.com/group-dates-in-pivot-table-google-sh...

smusamashah 2y ago
This is the text book answer. Not something you can actually do on a live sheet with all transactions. If you want to use a different aggregate e.g. week instead of month or skip first year or something like that you will be making these columns all over again.

miki123211 2y ago

My bank just exports to CSV, which is trivially importable to Excel, Sheets, Pandas or whatever else you need.

maxique 2y ago
As I understand it, the appeal of Monzo's way is it's live updating rather than having to log in to some horribly outdated online banking portal and manually export
- smusamashah 2y ago
  Yes exactly. The Google sheet is live. I couldn't just add a column in live sheet either. I had to copy the sheet using a formula so that its always up to date. And still had to use to other sheets. Chart is in the 4th sheet. In excel I would not have to do any of that.

homebrewer 2y ago

You're fine with Google seeing complete information about your income and spending? I'm not one of those truly paranoid, but this seems like a bit too much.

diggan 2y ago
That seems like the least "compromising" data, compared to other things we let them get. Imagine there are whole countries out there where income is public and accessible to anyone ;)
pxeger1 2y ago
What’s your risk model here? Google are not manually or automatically inspecting the contents of your spreadsheets in order to profile you and show you better-personalised ads. Not enough people have such a spreadsheet for it to be worth it for them, I’m sure - and they also probably already know approximately how wealthy you are. Unless you’re under investigation for fraud or something, I doubt the government could get much use out of being able to access your financial spreadsheets via Google compared to the information they already get directly from banks etc. So that only really leaves criminals (for whom I still can’t see a great incentive to read your spreadsheets), and I also don’t really think your Google account is much less secure than your computer’s local storage (if that’s the other place you would keep it)
- mixmastamyk 2y ago
  We’ve learned over and over that tech companies do things which seemingly make no sense to us, but do to them. Not being able to imagine it is not sufficient. Nothing is deleted anymore as well, in hopes it will be useful later. That said I don’t see a huge risk here, unless combined with lots of other data. Would probably avoid though.
- II2II 2y ago
  I simply want minimal exposure of my personal data since I don't want to go through life thinking about risk models. Not only is it time consuming, but my creative juices simply don't flow when it comes down to exploiting people (nor do I want them to flow in that direction).

flokie 2y ago

What about just plain old query() SQL i usually find the easiest vs. mucking around with pivot tables.

Closi 2y ago
SQL is fine if you don't want to play with the data interactively - but that's the real benefit of Pivot Tables. Things like drilling through, filtering/slicing, and then generating a graph, all in SaaS without having to run anything local.
- smusamashah 2y ago
  Yes exactly, excel's Pivot tables and charts are more powerful.