Google Sheets Archives

Web Scraping with Google Sheets: The Definitive Guide

In this tutorial, we learn how to scrape data from web pages and display the results in Google Sheets. We start with the standard built-in Sheets functions and move on to more advanced methods using custom JavaScript functions.

What is web scraping, you say? Web scraping is a technique of automatically extracting unstructured data from web pages using a computer rather than manually copying and pasting data. It is necessary when the data to extract is not available in a well-defined format such as JSON or XML.

Fetching, Filtering, and Sorting JSON APIs in Google Sheets: The Missing Functions

Do you need to fetch, filter, and sort JSON Web APIs in Google Sheets? This tutorial describes how you can add some functions to supplement the built-in Sheets functions and accomplish the goal with ease.

Do I Need an Umbrella Today? Google Sheets and JavaScript to the Rescue!

OK, Google Sheets! Send me an email if I need an umbrella today. Send an email using Google Sheets? Yes, that’s right! Sheets can do a lot more than add numbers and calculate your mortgage payments. In our last article, we learned how to consume JSON web data using Google Sheets and we built templates to display and sort weather forecast data. Today, we’ll build on what we covered last time and learn how to send email using Google Sheets based on the JSON data we retrieve. Let’s get practical and build something useful while we’re at it. Have you ever found yourself outside somewhere and it starts to rain Read More

Consuming JSON Web Data Using Google Sheets

Note: This article has been superseded with Fetching, Filtering, and Sorting JSON APIs in Google Sheets: The Missing Functions which provides a set of Google Sheets functions with additional capabilities. I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again. JSON has become the lingua franca for exchanging data on the web, and we (as developers) need to know how to process JSON data received from RESTful web services so we can be positioned for the present and for the future. My article on Consuming Node.js Microservices Created with stdlib provided a high-level tour covering several methods of parsing and processing JSON data. Last time, we focused on how to consume Read More