Google Sheets. Many people use them only as a quick replacement for Excel. Oh, a tool sufficient to view the attachment received in the mail.
However, Google sheets are so much more. It is not only a fully functional spreadsheet that has been put to us for free; it is also a set of functions and services that we can use as advanced users. Here are some tricks that will make you start using them more efficiently and creatively.
Table of Contents
Downloading data from websites
Google Sheets contain very good tools for analyzing and downloading data from web pages. They do not have to be pages in a special format: the same tool will analyze the structure of the page and find the most important data source in tabular form.
A function called IMPORTHTML is used for this purpose . If there is more than one table on a page, we can provide its next index in the parameter. For example, if we want to import data from a page
https://www.trenovision.com/is-it-actually-worth-buying-iphone-11-series
enter in the cell of the worksheet:
=IMPORTHTML(“https://www.trenovision.com/is-it-actually-worth-buying-iphone-11-series/”,“table”,1)
we get:
We can do the same with other data sources, also in the form of an unformatted list, then instead of the “table” parameter we give the value “list“:
=IMPORTHTML(“https://www.trenovision.com/is-it-actually-worth-buying-iphone-11-series/”,“List”,10)
Also Read : Google Translate: 12 amazing tricks to get the most out of the application
Language detection and text translation
We can use the DETECTLANGUAGE () function to detect the language of the text. It returns the language code that has been detected using Google Translate.
Now that we have the language code detected by Google Translate (and entered it into column B), we can use it as one of the parameters for the GOOGLETRANSLATE () function:
The syntax is easy:
=GoogleTranslate("text", "source language","target language")
Use of image URLs
The IMAGE function allows you to enter the image URL and insert it into a Google spreadsheet cell. Thanks to this, you can, for example, use the same logo in your sheets and change them in one place – where you have shared them. Example:
In addition to the URL to the image, we can also provide optional parameters that allow you to control the scaling of images (fit to size, stretch etc.).
Creating QR codes
Charts that we can add to Google sheets are actually created by a separate Google service, which is also available to developers. Therefore, the types of charts we can choose in the user interface are far from everything it can do.
This service can, inter alia, generate a QR code of a given size and content. The codes created in this way can be used e.g. to distribute web addresses, passwords or other data that we want to share with users of mobile devices.
We will use the already known function IMAGE () which will provide the address of the Google API service that can generate a QR Code:
=IMAGE (“https://chart.googleapis.com/chart?chs=200110200&cht=qr&chl=” & [cell address] & “”)
Fusion Tables for data presentation
Often sharing a spreadsheet containing a large amount of data is inefficient. Thousands of poems are difficult to scroll and analyze. A Google service called Fusion Tables ( https://fusiontables.google.com ) comes with the help . It is a relatively unknown but powerful tool that enables professional presentation of data and its interactive analysis. We get features such as data paging, interactive charts, and even data presentation on a map.
Fusion Tables are created very easily, and the project website has plenty of impressive examples of how large companies and institutions present their data with.
Also Read : How To Use Google Translate To Translate Different Languages?
