I’ve been a spreadsheet fanboy for a long time, for years Excel was king, but over the last decade Google Sheets has risen to take the throne. Obviously this is just my opinion but an opinion I believe in! Yes, Excel still has its spot in the market but over the years it’s become bloated and more confusing to use. As an EdTECH Director in a Google Workspace for Education district I’ve had a love/hate relationship with Google products over the years. However, Google Sheets is the one product that keeps impressing me time and time again. I often feel like there is to much focus on “this suite is better than that one” and it’s often based solely on the name in front of the product. Every productivity suite has its pros and cons, and I don’t believe any one company has all of the best products. If I need to create an amazing presentation…I’m going with PowerPoint, even though Keynote is still a great product. For word processing…I’m headed straight to Apples Pages. But for spreadsheets my go to is always Google Sheets. Why? Well for several reasons…
Ease of use
Google sheets is the cleanest looking of all the spreadsheet products. Yes, maybe the UI is dated with the classic File, Edit, View… menu structure but it simply works. Nothing wrong with not changing something that works! It’s been the standard menu structure for pretty much every piece of software since the 80’s and the majority of users are familiar with the layout.
One of my favorite features is how it auto-completes cells. When a formula is entered and there is data in the previous column it ask if you want to auto fill the formula down the column. It’s a simple thing to do manually but it’s a simple feature that saves a few steps and helps users who aren’t as proficient as advanced users.
Cloud Based
Being cloud based has many perks. For me the biggest is how easy it is to reference other sheets in your Google Drive. All you need is the URL to the sheet! This makes it extremely efficient to use multiple sheets as database and then another sheet for your dashboard.
Another feature that Google has done better than any other company is their collaboration. The sharing and collaboration features in the Google Drive suite is second to none. The lack of lag when working on a document with another person is truly impressive.
Apps Script
Google Sheets true power comes from Google Apps Scripts. It’s a cloud-based development system that uses JavaScript and it enables users to fully unleash the power of Google. You can automate numerous task such as uploading and changing the data based on a csv file, run scripts based on different triggers, etc.
An excellent example of this is recently at the school we’ve been looking for attendance tracking software. After looking at several different vendors we decided that no one offered the specific tracking we needed. Most meet state requirements but nothing worked for our district attendance policies. After thinking about it all evening, I decided to give it a go and build our own “app”! So I set off to figure out how I could accomplish this. What would be the simplest product to use? What would be familiar for all users involved? Google Sheets! While not a “database” per se, it can be setup similar to one. The goal…to have a dashboard that is updated daily based on our SIS data. No user interaction once it’s setup. So I started by building the report and exporting it from our SIS to a local server. Then I used a Linux app called rsync to upload the csv file to a Google Drive folder. Next, thanks to the power of Apps Script, I wrote a script (with the help of ChatGPT!) to look at the most recent csv in that folder and update the data sheet in the attendance tracker. From there all I needed to do was query and filter the data into the dashboard based on our district policies. The results were fantastic and exactly what our attendance team needed. I’m not sure if this was the best or right way to do this but it does work and everyone involved can easily view the information.
Conclusion
If you’ve been an excel fan since the OG days, don’t be afraid to give Google Sheets a try…it might surprise you! Don’t forget it never hurts to explore other options for anything. Try not to be a super fan of any one product and miss out on something that might be a better fit for what you’re working on!
If this specific use case is something you’d like more detail on please leave a comment and I’ll try to add a how-to-guide on setting this up.
