Google Spreadsheet Basics: A (Free) Introduction

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.

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!

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 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 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 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.