Laptop/Chromebook Advice

[darrenm]

6 minutes ago, blandy said:

Not commenting on Trent's situation, but a question if I may.

If you use a chromebook and want to listen to (and manage) music via an Iphone (or an Androids) don't you have to pay for the music service on the phone? foir Spotify, Amazon etc?, thus adding (over say 3 years of use) several hundred quids to the cost of the lappy? plus whatever data you use streaming or downloading tunes and podcasts etc.to the phone?

In essence, as much as it's the way things are going, aren't there drawbacks of the whole cloud music services/chromebook combo as well as advantages?

Don't know about any others but Google music is free to store and stream your own music. It only becomes paid for when you stream music you don't already own.

[blandy]

3 minutes ago, darrenm said:

Don't know about any others but Google music is free to store and stream your own music. It only becomes paid for when you stream music you don't already own.

Thanks. So you'd have to remember to put all your songs and albums into the google music clouds before getting rid of the old windeys lappy? then you just stream it all from the clouds...as long as you have a connection?

[limpid]

Just now, blandy said:

If you use a chromebook and want to listen to (and manage) music via an Iphone (or an Androids) don't you have to pay for the music service on the phone? foir Spotify, Amazon etc?, thus adding (over say 3 years of use) several hundred quids to the cost of the lappy? plus whatever data you use streaming or downloading tunes and podcasts etc.to the phone?

In essence, as much as it's the way things are going, aren't there drawbacks of the whole cloud music services/chromebook combo as well as advantages?

We've gone through this before. Google Play and Amazon Music both allow you to upload your music for free and play it back for free. I don't use the Amazon app, but the Google Play Music App allows you to pin playlists on your device so that as you add music to a playlist, it automatically goes to devices that have that playlist pinned.

This is free (because they want you to buy their "unlimited" services).

[darrenm]

1 hour ago, blandy said:

Thanks. So you'd have to remember to put all your songs and albums into the google music clouds before getting rid of the old windeys lappy? then you just stream it all from the clouds...as long as you have a connection?

You have a background app in winders that watches folders and automatically uploads music to tha cloud man.

As Simon says, you pin whatever playlists (or albums, music etc) to be kept on device either internally or externally on cheap SD. It's pretty clever about caching too.

[Stevo985]

8 hours ago, TrentVilla said:

I've not looked at Chromebooks and don't really know much about them. Are they compatible with Apple devices (phones) and do they have word and excel?

Compatible with Apple Devices to an extent.

They don't have word and excel but they have google equivalents. In my experience the word processor is good, Google Sheets is not. Good enough for basic spreadsheets but not good enough if you want to do anything more than basic.

[Davkaus]

Probably worth pointing out that if you're happy with the concept of your productivity tools living in your web browser, but just don't feel that Google's are up to scratch, there's a free web version of MS Office that can be used. It presumably has some limitations, but I;ve been using it for spreadsheets that Google's version just can't handle, and I've not had any problems yet.

 

https://products.office.com/en-gb/office-online/documents-spreadsheets-presentations-office-online

[blandy]

17 hours ago, TrentVilla said:

So... good people of the VT IT crowd....

I need a loptop for the Mrs for business purposes, as cheap as possible.

Suggestions please.

I know it's tangential, but refurbished or second hand computers can also do the job, and they're obviously cheaper. I bought mine from the e-bay, basically good as new despite being nowehere near new, but does the things you'd want a laptop to do. I don't like E bay, as it's a bit of a nest, but needs must. 

[Stevo985]

Personally I wouldn't use a chromebook if I needed it for work. but it very much depends on what you're work is. 

If you're primarily using it for emails and writing then it would be fine. If you need it for spreadsheets or running certain programs or processing big data then it wouldn't be appropriate.

 

I think they're much better suited for use as a personal laptop for casual browsing and media

[limpid]

What do people do on spreadsheets that Google Sheets can't do? Genuinely interested.

I'm in the process of removing Office from our thousands of devices at work and we've got very few power users who will keep Excel for legacy reasons. They are users with large existing spreadsheets infected with VB macros.

Google sheets with it's scripting language can do everything we've thrown at it, we just don't have the resource to rework the large legacy sheets, so they'll be left. New stuff will be in Google Sheets.

[Davkaus]

For the companies I've worked at, it's been a case of: "If we're already having to keep it, and have our staff maintaining legacy spreadsheets using Excel, why also train them to use Google Apps Script?". G Suite is cheaper on paper, but if it requires retraining, and both tools are going to need to co-exist in some instances for the foreseeable future, there's not been much appetite to migrate.

It still has some issues opening up Excel sheets and retaining anything like the correct formatting too. I'm very much aware that that's almost entirely Microsoft's fault, but that's small comfort when users are being sent through Excel spreadsheets from other businesses/customers and they don't work properly. This is something that causes me annoyances even as an individual for personal use, it's not really something that I'd expect users to have to deal with.

[blandy]

37 minutes ago, limpid said:

What do people do on spreadsheets that Google Sheets can't do? Genuinely interested.

I don't know for sure, as I don't use or have the capability to use google sheets for work (due to the nature of m' job) but one thing I used to do was have a large spreadsheet database of equipment unit failures, with causes, patterns of defect..blah blah and then generate charts of the stats which were then live linked into a powerpoint presentation which could be called up at any time and automatically have the up to date charts of stats embedded - if that makes sense.

Pivot tables, as well, are they in there?

And then there's importing excel spreadsheets into Matlab (and other computer modelling tools), which is probably a bit rare for most people, but for science and engineering and stuff it's necessary at times. so for example an aircraft flightpath can be exported as a series of LLH co-ords from the aircraft logs, into excel and then imported into Matlab and plotted in 3D along with another criteria (e.g. signal strength, or fuel flow or...etc.). Yeah, niche, but there are lots of niches. - Edit (again) just searched the web and with a bit of extra fiddling at the Matlab end and some fiddling at the a/c log to excel end you could do that last thing, with the Matlab. Which is neat-ish.

So there's the vulnerability of the data being on google's servers that's also an issue.

[Xela]

12 hours ago, TrentVilla said:

 

Cheers, thats Chromebooks off the list then.

Will look at Dell and Lenovo, the later seem quite cheap I just wasn't sure how good they were.

I have a work Lenovo laptop and its bulletproof (Thinkpad). In fact, its the only laptop our company uses (must be 25,000 of them in use!)

[darrenm]

1 hour ago, blandy said:

 

So there's the vulnerability of the data being on google's servers that's also an issue.

Another tangent, but about 10 years ago when Google apps first came out I told my company this would be the future and we should start moving away from Microsoft on prem. The security and compliance people scoffed as they would never allow corporate data onto cloud infrastructure.

Fast forward to now and everyone and everything is office 365 with Microsoft Azure cloud stuff. But that's OK because Microsoft say it's OK.

[Stevo985]

2 hours ago, limpid said:

What do people do on spreadsheets that Google Sheets can't do? Genuinely interested.

 

If you have a basic spreadsheet that you want multiple users to be able to edit simultaneously then Google Sheets will do.

As soon as you get onto more complicated analysis or big data then Sheets is either incapable or too slow.

That being said, sheets is improving all the time. A couple of years ago it was utterly useless.

[blandy]

I'm not an expert, or even knowledgeable here, and the nature of my work is different to the norm, so let's say that where there's a particular need for "protection" of data from people who might like to get hold of it, that the cloud doesn't meet those needs by a million miles.

[limpid]

12 hours ago, blandy said:

I don't know for sure, as I don't use or have the capability to use google sheets for work (due to the nature of m' job) but one thing I used to do was have a large spreadsheet database of equipment unit failures, with causes, patterns of defect..blah blah and then generate charts of the stats which were then live linked into a powerpoint presentation which could be called up at any time and automatically have the up to date charts of stats embedded - if that makes sense.

This should be in an asset management software, not a spreadsheet  That would be our solution, except that we already have this kind of data stored in asset management software.

12 hours ago, blandy said:

Pivot tables, as well, are they in there?

Yes. (Just a howto - I'm not going to quote it here).

12 hours ago, blandy said:

And then there's importing excel spreadsheets into Matlab (and other computer modelling tools), which is probably a bit rare for most people, but for science and engineering and stuff it's necessary at times. so for example an aircraft flightpath can be exported as a series of LLH co-ords from the aircraft logs, into excel and then imported into Matlab and plotted in 3D along with another criteria (e.g. signal strength, or fuel flow or...etc.). Yeah, niche, but there are lots of niches. - Edit (again) just searched the web and with a bit of extra fiddling at the Matlab end and some fiddling at the a/c log to excel end you could do that last thing, with the Matlab. Which is neat-ish.

For other readers: You can export Google Sheets in many formats, including .XLSX  

12 hours ago, blandy said:

So there's the vulnerability of the data being on google's servers that's also an issue.

Data lives in the Cloud now and will only do so more in the future. I think the vulnerability argument is overplayed, but that's a conversation for another thread.

[limpid]

10 hours ago, Stevo985 said:

If you have a basic spreadsheet that you want multiple users to be able to edit simultaneously then Google Sheets will do.

As soon as you get onto more complicated analysis or big data then Sheets is either incapable or too slow.

That being said, sheets is improving all the time. A couple of years ago it was utterly useless.

The collaborative working is superb.

We have some huge spreadsheets, so this might have been improved since you used it. About 3-4 years ago there was a major change including an (internal) format change which significantly made things like large sheets and docs a lot quicker.

It might be worth revisiting  

[Stevo985]

Just now, limpid said:

The collaborative working is superb.

We have some huge spreadsheets, so this might have been improved since you used it. About 3-4 years ago there was a major change including an (internal) format change which significantly made things like large sheets and docs a lot quicker.

It might be worth revisiting  

It might be, except there's no way on earth my company would let us use it, probably regarding the security issues Blandy mentioned above.

Whether that's right or wrong I have no idea.

[limpid]

If you think using on prem software helps security, you should read this article. (It's not long).

Quote

The big problem with Microsoft Word and malware is that the files are so ubiquitous, there’s a good chance someone will get duped into opening the file. Pro tip: don’t do this. Seriously, don’t ever open a mysterious file attached to an email or on a thumb drive. There’s a decent chance it’s not only mysterious but also malicious. Some security companies have entire webpages devoted to warnings about Microsoft Word malware. You should really consider using another word processing tool, perhaps something like Google Docs that lives in the cloud and presents less of a threat to your precious computer. Did I also mention that it’s free?

 

[Stevo985]

I don't