I’ve been pulling my hair out whenever I start to ask ChatGPT anything. I’ve been dormant for a bit doing other things, but now I need it to work for me. So, I ask it to generate a table of information for me. Works well. I get an HTML table that is readable and useful. But then I start to ask GPT to do some manipulation on the table and it eventually spits out a pseudo-spreadsheet.
Ok, whatev. I try and copy the contents of the pseudo-sheet and it won’t let me. I use DevTools to figure out what’s going on, and I find that it is a view which deletes the data that is not visible and bring in the data that is. This would be ok, if it weren’t for the fact that I can’t download the data. One psheet allowed me to as a csv, but another wouldn’t. I get:
This XML file does not appear to have any style information associated with it. The document tree is shown below.
AuthenticationFailedServer failed to authenticate the request. Make sure the value of Authorization header is formed correctly including the signature. RequestId:3125fcdd-701e-0054-7c6c-3c0618000000 Time:2024-11-21T23:25:45.9024654Z
Signed expiry time [Thu, 21 Nov 2024 23:23:22 GMT] must be after signed start time [Thu, 21 Nov 2024 23:25:45 GMT]
This is NOT COOL. As I write this, I have tried downloading again and I found that it did work, MUCH MUCH LATER, but that’s not the point. I was only able to see the data, scroll through the data, but I wasn’t able to get the data in a meaningful way. Also, I don’t want to always have to dl it as a csv. Sometimes, I only want part of the table, so copy/paste would be the preferred method.
There doesn’t appear to be any rhyme or reason when GPT changes from an HTML table to this psheet junk. It’s not only hard to read, but if there is some failure on the server (what type of failure, I’m not sure) I am them blocked from retrieving the data, wasting a lot of time and effort. GPT isn’t even aware of this as I told it to stop making this view and go back to the old HTML table view and it can’t. And when I say, “Hard to read”, I mean it. I have to dl the csv, put it into a spreadsheet and then realize that GPT f*ed up again. This additional work is very time consuming and is not wanted.
If the devs put this in, they need to be able to back it out if requested at the GPT prompt, because this is just infuriating.