Yup, I do this. And have done it to manage reporting projects because it helps the researchers realize that there are facets of information that we need to collect for every row. And then creating a visualization or analysis takes little more work than writing a script to loop over every row.

A popular plugin among the data-journalism crowd is tabletop.js...spreadsheet data is uploaded to Google Docs, and data-stories use it to create interactive graphics.

https://github.com/jsoma/tabletop

I feel less and less comfortable relying on Google for something this important.

Leaning more towards solutions that I can completely control and host/backup myself.

Quite a comprehensive write-up.