Spreadsheets and Forms

Site out of date

Please note that this site is now out of date and has been replaced by Google Workspace: a Practical Guide. If you came here from a link, please update the link accordingly. If you have any questions, please email itsupport@york.ac.uk FAO the DISC team.

Google Sheets

Google Sheets are able to do many of the same things as Excel, but have the advantage of being much better for collaborative work.

The common features include graphs and charts, but Google Sheets can produce additional visualisations including maps.

You can also use Google Forms to populate a spreadsheet by collecting data with an online form.

You'll find more details and examples using these links:

Links

Links open in a new window/tab

Visit the Essential Spreadsheets section of the Working with Data site

Read this Google Document that includes an overview of Google Spreadsheets

View this summary presentation on Google Spreadsheets (used in Knowledge-Sharing events)

See this New Spreadsheets Example illustrating some of the features

See also this example spreadsheet of Data Visualisations and the Visualisation Examples page

Visit the Google Sheets support pages and the Forms support pages

Google Sheets and Data

If you work with lists of data, you will discover that the sort and filter tools don't seem to be as well developed as in Excel. This points not to a deficiency in Google Sheets, but to a different approach that is better suited to a collaborative environment.

Simple sorting and filtering are 'destructive' processes, in that the source data is acted on directly. The alternative approach is to generate additional views of the data, leaving the underlying data set untouched.

Google Sheets achieve this using Filter Views and range of functions:

Links

Links open in a new window/tab

This document, Google Sheets Data Functions, explains how to interrogate shared data sets - includes links to examples

This data functions examples sheet shows the use of data functions

View a description of using the Google Sheets Query function

Examples of using the Query function can be found in this sheet

Page updated

Report abuse