Notice on Google Form Spreadsheet usage

Notice on using Google Form/Spreadsheet for reports storage

The initial configuration of ACRA offers to send reports to a Google Docs (Drive) Form which stores reports data in a Google Docs spreadsheet.

This comes really handy when you start developing an app and can't afford spending time and/or money on hosting a reports storage engine yourself.

There are some limitations to the usage of Google Documents though, detailed here: http://support.google.com/drive/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=37603

Spreadsheets are limited to 400,000 (four hundred thousands) cells, which lets you imagine receiving approximately 11,000 (eleven thousands) reports before reaching the limit.

Even if this looks like a huge number of reports, you have to be aware that:

• the UI of the spreadsheet tends to become rather slow when a large amount of data is contained in the spreadsheet
• an overloaded spreadsheet can't be opened anymore

If your application is used by a large number of users, the delivery of a faulty update with a single bug experienced by a large portion of them can quickly lead to an overloaded spreadsheet.