Get Early Access to My New App “Favorite Things” and Unlock the Value of Storing Data in Sheets
When I teach my Excel to Google Sheets courses, I like to start off with a bang and show new users one of the most overpowered (but complex) formulas in the Sheets arsenal, IMPORTRANGE.
Why IMPORTRANGE? It allows you to query data from any other Sheet in your company. This is one of the biggest payoffs for working in the cloud — every other file is already there, waiting for you. As an anecdote (that I have lived to see), imagine your entire company shares a rate card or other all-knowing “SOURCE OF TRUTH” document as an xls you need to reference all the time (if you’re a People person like me, this is a census report of the whole company that I use daily).
Door #1: you keep the excel file or sheet hosted view only and people download it every single day that they need to work with the data.
Door #2: If you’re me, you keep the messy ffs626fs2_u3u8d38d looking Sheet ID on a desktop sticky note, use IMPORTRANGE to query the file, and pull in a range called DATA over and over like =IMPORTRANGE(“ffs626fs2_u3u8d38d”,”data!A:Z”).
But what if there were a door #3?
One thing that makes me sad about Google Workspace is that this particular corner of the suite neglected to take advantage of the “picker” functionality of Drive that lets you browse all of your files from inside an application:
Imagine if you could just search for your favorite source of truth by name, not ID, draw the right range up without even having to open the tab, and get on with your day? Well…
Favorite Things for Sheets aims to free you from a life of open tabs and 100-character formulas by allowing you to do just that — save a favorite range of data and summon it on command. See the demo below:
Interested? Because the app verification process is so time consuming, I want to get the app right first. If you’d like to join the beta release as an individual OR an enterprise/team, please fill out this 3 question form (or email inquiries@maxbrawer.com.
