Educator and Google Developer Expert. Helping you navigate the world of spreadsheets & AI.
The REPT function in Google Sheets is used to repeat an expression a set number of times.
The REPT formula to repeat “Go! ” three times is:
=REPT("Go! ", 3)Notice the additional space added after the exclamation point, so that there is a space between the repeated values in the output.
In 2021, I joined 40 other entrepreneurs for the first cohort of Billy Broas’ live online cohort-based course, the Keystone Accelerator.
It’s an 8-week program covering how to market and launch cohort-based courses (CBCs).
Cohort-based courses are online courses where a group of students join at the same time and progress through the course together. Typically, students in a CBC meet online via Zoom for interactive sessions and work on course materials between sessions.
They’re fundamentally different to self-paced video courses because the emphasis shifts from being content-centric to being community-centric.
Students get the benefit of accountability, a peer group and expert teacher(s) for questions, and a community in which to celebrate wins and share challenges. CBC’s provide structure and guidance for students. Consequently, they have much higher completion rates than self-paced courses and better outcomes for students.
I joined this Keystone cohort course because I’m creating my own live training course and I wanted to learn from the experts on how to build, market and sell these types of courses.
We met twice a week for 90 minutes over Zoom – with participants calling in from all over the world – to learn an education-based marketing framework. In addition, I joined weekly peer coaching groups to brainstorm ideas and critique each other’s work in a safe environment.
Here are my top five takeaways from taking a cohort-based course that I want apply to my own course, the Pro Sheets Accelerator:
I’d never done a live cohort-based course before Keystone. I’d experienced plenty of webinars, in-person courses and self-paced video courses.
But this was different.
Keystone was unlike any other learning experience I’ve had.
It combined the content of an on-demand video course with the accountability, rapid feedback and community of an in-person event.
Accountability pushes you to show up and do the work.
Rapid feedback means you don’t get stuck for long periods and learn quickly from your mistakes.
Community provides a safe space to share wins and challenges and make new friends.
Combining these three factors with world-class content is the best way to facilitate the student transformation.
For first cohort of the Pro Sheets Accelerator, I want to foster a really strong community to maximize these benefits.
If you join, you’ll be in a group of 30 – 40 students, with a private course forum, peer groups and office hours, in addition to the main teaching sessions.
I joined a group of 40 super smart, motivated entrepreneurs, all building their own live training courses in wildly different industries.
Some were earlier in their journeys than me, some were further along.
Together, the breadth of experiences, ideas and insights far surpassed what I, as an individual, could have achieved.
Truly a case of the whole being greater than the sum of its parts.
I learned a lot from the peer coaching sessions, both from giving and receiving feedback. Seeing how other people solve problems, how they think and how they approach opportunities and challenges, was hugely valuable.
Like a wifi network that gets stronger as more nodes are added and interlinked, the new connections you make through a CBC improve your chances of success with your own business.
I’m a firm believer that education should be enjoyable and that you learn best when you’re having fun. We should take inspiration from young children who learn through play.
If it’s enjoyable, you’re more likely to succeed.
Instead of watching the clock and counting down until the end of a boring lecture, you’re emotionally present and absorbing information. You’re in the zone of proximal development.
In the past year, we’ve all been starved of human connection and friendship.
Although CBCs are online, you’re still going through an intense shared experience with other folks.
Naturally friendships form as people get to know each other and become more comfortable. You begin to see beneath the surface and really learn from each other.
Pro Sheets Accelerator will be a fun experience. My goal is for everyone to enjoy the course first and foremost.
The Keystone course I participated in is a marketing course. Its promise is that it’ll teach you how to market and sell cohort-based courses.
But along the way, I picked up tons of other ideas. Ideas that weren’t on the syllabus but arose through digressions, chats with peers or from surprise bonus sessions with guest experts.
Simply from being part of this cohort-based course, I learned about how to run one. I saw first hand how many moving pieces there are and why you need help to run one. Everything from the first onboarding call through to how to structure the live Zoom calls and exercises.
Tiago Forte, one of the world’s leading experts on CBCs who runs the hugely successful Building A Second Brain course, joined this Keystone course and added his perspective to the program.
In addition, we had workshops on the operations side of running CBCs from course director Will Mannon, and on how to create engaging experiences for our students from learning designer Andrew Barry. Both of these added valuable insights outside of the marketing curriculum of the main course.
Encouraging curiosity, fostering peer-led learning and surprising students with guest speakers are all great ways to add value to a CBC.
I plan to implement all of these in the Pro Sheets Accelerator course.
When it comes to content, less is more.
What this means in practice is that the emphasis of the course shifts from cramming in as much content as possible (a traditional signal of value) to focusing on students’ transformational learning experiences.
The goal of a CBC is for your students’ life to change. You’re guiding them across the bridge from their current status quo to the new, better life.
For example, in the Keystone course, I came away with a much deeper understanding of CBCs and education based marketing. I now have a playbook I can apply to my own business.
What I don’t have is a library of 300 videos on marketing, which I would never have the time to watch, much less implement.
This realization with regards to content – that less is more – was a key shift I noticed in myself during this Keystone course.
For the Pro Sheets Accelerator cohort-based course, my original plan was to focus on making it as comprehensive as possible, covering Google Sheets and Apps Script from top to bottom.
It would have been impossible to achieve and unmanageable for students.
Now, my plan is to focus on two areas:
Yes, they’re still big topics, but they’re focussed. I can build a syllabus that goes deep into these subjects and delivers huge value, in a way that won’t overwhelm students.
The material will be relevant. Students will learn just enough to experience a transformation but not too much that it gets diluted.
It’s been 4 years since I launched my first online course, How To Build Dashboards in Google Sheets.
Since then, over 40,000 students from 1,000s of organizations have registered for one or more of my online courses.
All of these courses are self-serve video courses.
Now it’s time to add a new experience-based course into the mix, as the next evolution of my education business.
I’m building a cohort-based course called Pro Sheets Accelerator, which will teach you how to leverage the power of data and automation in Google Sheets to grow your business and career.
The first cohort begins at the end of April. I’m super excited to bring together a group of Sheets aficionados for a transformative learning experience. Join us!
The PI function in Google Sheets returns the value of the mathematical constant pi (π) to 9 decimal places: 3.141592654
Pi is defined as the ratio of a circle’s circumference to its diameter.
Pi is denoted by the Greek lowercase letter π
=PI()There are no arguments. If you put anything between the brackets the formula will give you an error.
Continue reading PI Function in Google Sheets And Other Fun π Facts
The INDIRECT function in Google Sheets is used to convert text strings into valid cell or range references.
For example, the INDIRECT function will convert the text string “A1” into the cell reference A1. The formula is:
=INDIRECT("A1")which is equivalent to this formula:
= A1It gives the answer 10 in the following example because that’s the value in cell A1:
The IF function in Google Sheets is used to make decisions with your data. It’s from the Logical family of functions in Google Sheets.
In this tutorial, you’ll see how to use IF formulas in Google Sheets to make decisions with your data.
At its heart, the IF function is a test that evaluates to a true or false value with a defined behavior if the outcome is true and a different behavior when the outcome is false.
Let’s see an example.
Suppose you have two columns of numbers in A and B and you want to compare each row to see which column has the larger number.
You would use the IF function in Google Sheets to do this!
=IF( A2 > B2 , "Column 1 is larger" , "Column 1 is less than or equal to column 2" )Inside the IF formula, the first expression A2 > B2 checks whether the value in cell A2 is greater than the value in cell B2.
The outcome of this test is either a TRUE or a FALSE value.
The IF function requires a TRUE or FALSE value for this first argument.
Next up, you specify what you want to happen when the result is true. In this example the output of the function in the cell is “Column 1 is larger”
The final argument is the value you want to show if the result is false. In this example, that means the number in column A was smaller (or equal to) the value in column B. In this case, the output of the function is “Column 1 is less than or equal to column 2”.
=IF(logical_expression, value_if_true, value_if_false)You might hear it referred to as an IF function, an IF formula or even an IF statement, but they all mean the same thing.
It takes 3 arguments:
logical_expression
An expression that gives a TRUE or FALSE answer, or a cell that contains a TRUE or FALSE value.
value_if_true
The value displayed by the IF function if the logical expression has the TRUE value.
value_if_false
The value displayed by the IF function if the logical expression has the FALSE value.
Click here to open a view-only copy >>
Feel free to make a copy: File > Make a copy…
If you can’t access the template, it might be because of your organization’s Google Workspace settings. If you click the link and open in an Incognito window you’ll be able to see it.
The IF function is also covered in the Day 2 lesson of my free Advanced Formulas 30 Day Challenge course.
You can also read about it in the Google documentation.
IF functions can be combined with other functions to perform calculations on values above a certain threshold for example.
When the logical expression is true, do this calculation, otherwise leave the value as it is.
Perhaps your business has a performance bonus structure that pays out a 20% bonus above a certain threshold of client revenue. Use an IF statement to determine if the threshold has been met and then put the calculation in the true field:
=IF( A1 > 100000 , A1 * 0.2 , 0 )
Another example use case for the IF function is to classify items.
For example, you might want to segment your customers into long-term customers and new customers, based on whether they’ve been a client for 12 months or longer.
Suppose column A was a column containing the number of months a client has been with you, the following IF formula would classify them into long-term or new clients:
=IF( A1 >= 12 , "Long-term client" , "New client" )
This kind of segmentation is useful in lots of different ways.
It lets you compare the retention and churn metrics of the two groups. You can run different marketing campaigns to different segments of your data. Or, maybe you just want to send a “Thank you, you’re awesome!” card to your long-term clients.
Sometimes one IF function alone isn’t enough.
Inside the TRUE or the FALSE arguments you can nest another IF function.
It looks complex but if you apply the onion method for working with formulas and work in layers, you’ll see it’s not difficult.
Working from the outside in, it checks if the value is greater than 50. If that is true, then the formula is done and it displays “Greater than 50”.
But if that’s false, it must mean the value is either less than 50 or equal to 50, so we use a second, nested IF to check for that:
=IF(A2 > 50,"Greater than 50",IF(A2 < 50,"Less than 50","Equal to 50"))
If your nested IF formulas get too complicated, you might want to try the SWITCH function.
Combining checkboxes with IF formulas is a powerful and versatile technique to use in your Sheets.
Checkboxes are actually just TRUE or FALSE values in disguise!
With a checkbox in cell A2, it can only ever have a TRUE or FALSE value. So it can be plugged into the IF function’s first argument directly!
= IF( A2 , "It's checked!" , "It's not checked." )
This sort of logic is useful in many settings, for example a dashboard where you want to show/hide additional context for specific numbers or charts.
In the example above, you had a formula already in column A that contained a TRUE or FALSE value.
Since the first argument of the IF statement is looking for a TRUE of FALSE, you only need to reference that cell directly without testing for TRUE / FALSE.
Your IF formula would look like this:
=IF( A1 , "Something true" , "Something false" )There is NO need to test for TRUE or FALSE again. So you should not see an IF function like this:
=IF( A1 = TRUE , "Something true" , "Something false" )In fact, you should never see an “= TRUE” or “= FALSE” in an IF statement because they’re redundant.
Suppose you have a column of values that you want to cap at a certain level, so that everything above a threshold value, e.g. 200, gets set to that value.
Most of us would approach this by writing an IF formula that checks whether the value is above 200 and then set it to 200 if TRUE, or the actual value if FALSE, like so:
However, you can replace the whole IF function with a much more succinct MIN function, which chooses the value 200 if the actual value is larger, since 200 is the minimum:
=MIN( A2 , 200 )
Similarly, we can use the MAX function to replace IF statements when we’re looking at a threshold on the low side.
It’s good practice to write efficient formulas because it’s quicker and you’re less likely to make mistakes.