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Cool Google Sheets tricks

Google Sheets has some very powerful tricks up its sleeve
Written by Adrian Kingsley-Hughes, Contributing Writer

If you work with spreadsheets a lot then you might like to take a look at Google Sheets, because it has some really interesting tricks up its sleeve.

Google Sheets is something that I've not had much reason to use much, but a few weeks ago I had a small project to do that involved using it, and I was quite surprised to find that it had some really neat features built in.

Here are some of my favorites.

Translation

Yeah, I never knew that Google Sheets could leverage Google Translate and offer up in-document translations.

Here's the sample function I used here:

=GOOGLETRANSLATE(A2, "en", "de")

It works using two-letter country codes (en, jp, ko, ru, es, etc), or auto can also be used to detect the source.

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Stock prices

Another simple function that I can see being super useful.

Here's the sample function I used here:

=GOOGLEFINANCE(A2)

This can also be used to pull up a share price for a specific date range.

Here's the sample function I used here:

=GOOGLEFINANCE("GOOG", "price", DATE(2020,1,1), DATE(2020,1,31), "DAILY")

Charts

You can also draw mini charts in cells. Their usefulness might be a bit limited, but they can be a good way to offer a simple overview for a lot of data.

Here's a sample function for a column chart:

=SPARKLINE(B2:B21,{"charttype","column"})

And here's sample function for a line chart:

=SPARKLINE(B2:B21,{"charttype","line"})

Explore a data in greater depth

See that button at the bottom-right of the window with the star on it that says Explore when you hover over it? Click on that and a panel pops up that shows up information related to the data you highlighted, such as sums, averages, min and max, charts, and more.

I particularly like the way this allows me to quickly and easily drag out a chart into the main spreadsheet. This is a massive timesaver every time I need to build a chart.

For more information on the different functions you can use in Google Sheets, check out this page.

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