Master Google Sheets (and see why it's better than Excel)

In this course we'll start by covering the basics of Google Spreadsheets so you can be just as proficient using it as you are with Excel. Google spreadsheets can do everything Microsoft Excel can do, but is better for multiple reasons.

Docs comes with sharing, auto-updating and commenting features that Excel lacks. Plus, you can pull in data from the internet (APIs, XML feeds and other cool stuff we cover in the course) in real time that you can't with Excel.

Once you learn how to use Google Spreadsheets, you'll never go back. This lecture covers some of the main reasons why Google Spreadsheets is so awesome.

In this lecture, we cover the basics of creating a Google Spreadsheet, naming it, and sharing it with others.

Please, if you are already familiar with Excel, feel free to skip down to the next section on manipulating data. Many of the things covered in this section (formatting data and rows/columns) are done the same way they're done in Excel.

This lecture covers the basics of formatting:

• how to format each cell individually
• how to change background and font colors
• how to add or remove borders
• how to format large groups of cells at once

In this lecture, we cover how to freeze rows and columns for easier viewing when scrolling through large amounts of data or a really big spreadsheet.

Conditional formatting is amazing. It allows you to filter out and change the format of only data that meets certain conditions or criteria.

In this lecture, we cover how to use conditional formatting to display only the data you care about, and to gain insight at-a-glance. This is a very useful tool when dealing with large amounts of data.

Quick quiz to determine your spreadsheet formatting knowledge!

In this lecture we cover how to sort data using the filter and sort functionality in Google Spreadsheets.

This lecture covers how to use Google Spreadsheet's filter views. This is a really useful tool to quickly filter what data you see and how it's displayed within your document.

Find and replace is a useful tool to find any data on a spreadsheet. With replace, you can also automatically replace any data (misspellings, grammatical errors, spacing problems) by having Spreadsheets do the searching and replacing for you!

One neat thing about Spreadsheets is the revision history tool. This feature (which Excel doesn't have) allows you to see a history of revisions that have been made on your spreadsheet.

It also allows you to roll back any changes that may have happened accidentally, which means you'll never need to save multiple versions of a document again!

Quiz to determine how well you can manipulate your spreadsheet data.

In this video, we cover the essential elements of a formula or function, and show you how to build one.

Every formula follows this setup:

1. Begins with an equals sign "="
2. Followed by the name of the function you're using - "SUM", for example
3. Followed by parentheses "()"
4. Which are filled by the arguments you're evaluating.

For example, if we wanted to add two cells together, A1 and A2, we would use the following formula: =SUM(A1,A2). Or, we could add the range of the two cells like so: =SUM(A1:A2)

Lastly, we cover absolute vs. relative positioning in this lecture. When writing a formula, if you want the formula to continuously reference a single cell, you can make it an absolute reference using "$" before the column letter and row number. For example, if you wanted a formula to reference a value in cell A1, you'd type $A$1 to make sure your formula always referenced cell A1, regardless of where you copied the formula to.

In this lecture, we cover the kinds of formulas you can use:

• Array functions
• Database functions
• Date functions
• Engineering functions
• Filtering functions
• Financial functions
• Google-specific functions
• Info functions
• Logical functions
• Lookup functions
• Math functions
• Operator functions
• Parsers
• Statistical functions
• Text functions

The ones we'll be focusing on in this course will be the Array, Google-specific, Logical, Math, Lookup and Text functions. Please leave a comment if there are other functions you'd like me to explore further!

In this lecture we have a list of all possible formulas you can use in Spreadsheets.

In this section, we cover several of the common math functions:

SUM - Returns the sum of a series of numbers and/or cells.

AVERAGE - Returns the numerical average value in a dataset, ignoring text.

MAX - Returns the maximum value in a numeric dataset.

MIN - Returns the minimum value in a numeric dataset.

COUNT - Returns a count of the numeric values in a dataset.

In this section, we cover the most common logic functions:

AND - Returns true if all of the provided arguments are logically true, and false if any of the provided arguments are logically false.

OR - Returns true if any of the provided arguments are logically true, and false if all of the provided arguments are logically false.

IF - Returns one value if a logical expression is `TRUE` and another if it is `FALSE`.

In this lecture, we cover some common formulas and functions you can use to manipulate text data:

CONCATENATE - Appends strings to one another.

LOWER - Converts a specified string to lowercase.

UPPER - Converts a specified string to uppercase.

PROPER - Capitalizes each word in a specified string.

In this lecture, we cover how to use LEFT and RIGHT to modify strings and cell data to return what you want:

LEFT - Returns a substring from the beginning of a specified string.

RIGHT - Returns a substring from the end of a specified string.

In this lecture, we cover some other common functions used to manipulate text:

FIND - Returns the position at which a string is first found within text. FIND returns exact matches of text and is case-sensitive.

SEARCH - Also returns the position at which a string is first found within text, but is not case-sensitive and is less exact than FIND.

REPLACE - Replaces part of a text string with a different text string. Need to know the location of what you're replacing.

SUBSTITUTE - Replaces existing text with new text in a string. Handy for substituting new data for old data without knowing the specific location of what you are substituting.

SPLIT - Divides text around a specified character or string, and puts each fragment into a separate cell in the row.

In this assignment, use what you've learned to create your own functions!

In this lecture we introduce how to use charts and graphs in Google spreadsheets. If you're proficient at creating charts and graphs in Excel, feel free to skip this section. We'll cover things like Pivot charts in the advanced section of this course.

In this lecture we cover the different kinds of charts you can use and when each type is appropriate.

In this lecture we cover how to create our first chart. Simply go to Insert -> Chart and select from the variety of chart options!

In this lecture, I'll show you how to create all different kinds of charts using Gold medal data from our Olympic dataset.

In this lecture, I show you how to create a scatterplot to identify the relationship between an Olympic athlete's age and the number of medals he or she has won.

Now pull together everything you've learned to create your own chart!

Quiz to test your mastery of using charts and graphs

Everything covered from here on out is more advanced tools, formulas and functions. We'll cover lookups, pivot tables, macros, arrays, and scripting functions you can only use with Google Spreadsheets.

To those of you who skipped the earlier material due to familiarity, welcome. To the rest of you, buckle in - we're about to show you some cool stuff!

VLOOKUP: Vertical lookup. Searches down the first column of a range for a key and returns the value of a specified cell in the row found.

HLOOKUP: Horizontal lookup. Searches across the first row of a range for a key and returns the value of a specified cell in the column found.

MATCH: Returns the relative position of an item in a range that matches a specified value.

In this lecture, we introduce the VLOOKUP formula and show you when and how you can use it.

In this exercise, we'll test your mastery of the VLOOKUP formula.

I recommend not watching this lecture until you've tried to complete the previous lecture on your own. No cheating :)

In this section, we'll cover additional resources around VLOOKUP.

In this lecture, we introduce you to the HLOOKUP formula, and cover how you can use it.

Complete this exercise with HLOOKUP.

In this quiz we'll test your mastery of the Lookup functions.

In this lecture we show you how to use ImportXML to pull data from the internet into your Spreadsheet.

In this lecture we'll cover some more ImportXML syntax.

We'll learn how to pull XML data from other websites into our Spreadsheets, where we can then manipulate and use it.

In this lecture, we cover how to pull traffic data from Alexa into a spreadsheet using ImportXML and xPath.

A list of excellent resources for ImportXML mastery.

This quiz will test your knowledge of ImportXML.

In this lecture, I cover how to use ImportHTML. It's a bit easier to use than ImportXML, though not as useful for most kinds of webpages. Generally, I only like to use ImportHTML to pull data from pages with clearly structured lists or tables.

In this lecture we'll introduce you to Macros (also known as Google Scripts) in Spreadsheets.

In this lecture, we'll show you how to write a macro using Google Scripts to automate tasks and functions.

Example for writing your first macro!

In this quiz, we'll test your knowledge of Spreadsheets macros.

Learn how to use Spreadsheet Addons to do more with Google Spreadsheets.

More on how you can leverage the powerful free tool of Spreadsheet Booster.