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.

Three Ways to Build Dynamic Web APIs using PHP

In this article, we learn how to build dynamic Web APIs using PHP. Why PHP? PHP is a very popular programming language used for rendering server-side web pages and is included as a standard option with many web hosting providers including HostGator (my provider). I had a need to generate simulated one-minute IoT data for a recent article I wrote on Fetching, Filtering, and Sorting JSON APIs in Google Sheets: The Missing Functions. Much to my surprise and delight, PHP is both powerful and fun, and I am here to share some of my learnings with you. Let’s get started and highlight three ways to build dynamic Web APIs using PHP.

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.