Let’s kick off this post with one of the all-time top Google Sheet productivity tips:
Use keyboard shortcuts to work more efficiently. It might feel clumsy at first, but persevere and it’ll pay off in spades as you become more efficient in your work.
Continue reading 6 Killer Productivity Tips for Google Sheets
Have you ever wanted use the VLOOKUP function with multiple criteria?
For example, you may want to use first name and last name combined to search for a value using Vlookup.
In this post, you’ll see how to Vlookup multiple criteria in Google Sheets, with three different scenarios.
Continue reading VLOOKUP Multiple Criteria in Google Sheets
Best wishes to you all for 2019!
This is one of my favorite posts of the year to write, because it’s my chance to reflect and look back at the whole year, and celebrate the wins and learn from my mistakes. It’s a chance to assess growth (both for the business and personally) and think about where I want to go in 2019.
2018 was extremely rewarding, but also extremely challenging at times.
Life and business are both moving forwards again and I go into 2019 full of optimism.
Starting with the highlights:
I found a talented designer on peopleperhour.com to create some new course logos for my online courses:
Compare that to the old course logos:
Worth every penny! I was really pleased with how they turned out and they’re so much stronger visually than the old screenshot logos I was using initially.
This is definitely something I want to continue to invest in this coming year.
I invested a little bit of time and money to make the office more personal, so it was somewhere I’d want to spend time and feel inspired when I was there.
I hung a few pictures on the walls and built a LEGO Saturn V rocket model to go on top of the bookcase (can you spot it?):
A Gentleman in Moscow – Amor Towles
An absolutely fantastic read about a Russian Count under house arrest in a Moscow hotel
The Worst Journey in the World – Apsley Cherry-Gerrard
A classic tale of hardship and true adventure (my second read through)
The Rise and Fall of the Dinosaurs – Steve Brusette
An eminently readable romp through the world of dinosaurs and paleontologists
So 2018 was not without its challenges.
I had pneumonia earlier in the year that took forever to kick, and made for some nervous months and LOTS of doctor visits. I was basically sick, to varying degrees, most of the days between March and June. I got sick again in September but since then I’ve felt (mostly) back to normal (whatever that is).
Being a two working-parent household doesn’t get any easier (well, it has a little bit since both boys are sleeping through the night). My wife and I are both ambitious and love our work, but balancing being a good dad, a good husband and working hard on my business is still super hard. You end up always feeling like you’re not doing a good enough job at any of them, and it’s mentally exhausting.
I missed some of my targets this year. I didn’t hit my overall course revenue goal (I got close), but being sick for so long meant I launched one less course than I’d planned. That’s life though! Can’t make any excuses, just got to keep working hard and do better in 2019.
My goals for 2019:
Of course, none of this would be possible without you readers.
Thank you for giving me this opportunity to share my experiences and knowledge, and carve out this teaching niche. My mission to create a world class resource for learning Data Analysis on the Google platform is just getting started.
Finally, good luck to all of you with your own endeavors and all the best for 2019!
Cheers,
Ben
2017 in review and a look forward to 2018
This is a guest post from Tomi Mester of data36.com
Back in 2011, during my college years, I got my first-ever job (an internship) at a cool IT startup. I got to do all kinds of interesting tasks but mostly it was data analysis.
The process was simple:
We learned a lot about user behaviour, trends, and how we reached (or didn’t reach) our goals. I loved it – except for one thing: I always had to wait days (sometimes weeks) for the developers to export the data for me from the company’s SQL database.
That was my #1 reason to learn SQL!
I did so. And ever since then Iāve been a huge fan of this simple and elegant data language.
Why?
Because knowing SQL allowed me to do better, more detailed data analyses – more easily and faster. And I strongly believe that it can be extremely useful for everyone else who works in data analytics and who uses different spreadsheet tools in their day-to-day job.
In this article, I’ll give you 6 reasons why you should learn SQL too!
Continue reading Six reasons to start learning SQL
“If you can’t measure it, you can’t improve it.” – Peter Drucker
Disclosure: Some of the links in this post are affiliate links, meaning I’ll get a small commission (at no extra cost to you) if you signup.
Trying to have conversations about saving, spending and planning for retirement is infinitely more difficult and more stressful without accurate numbers in front of you.
You fall back on anecdotes and feelings because you have nothing else to go on.
Conversations start with phrases like: “it feels like we haven’t spent much on eating out this month” and they don’t get any better from there.
My wife and I have two beautiful boys, aged 2 and 4, and we’re both ambitious with our careers and work full-time. Life is crazy, crazy busy for us right now.
We’ve found it challenging to find time to manage our family finances, so we’ve been in this position of flying blind without a financial tracking plan in place. We’ve had those frustrating conversations, knowing that if we had better insights into our financial habits we could do a much better job at financial planning.
I want to show you how we changed that.
How we created a system in Google Sheets for tracking our spending habits.
It now only takes us about 10 or 15 minutes each week, so we can focus on understanding our financial situation better, and maximize our saving.
Tiller is an amazing tool that connects our bank accounts and credit cards securely to Google Sheets (or Excel), and automatically updates them on a daily basis.
It means we can see all of our financial transactions in one place and do our own custom analysis in Google Sheets.
It’s been transformative for our family’s sanity and helped us get on top of our spending and hit our saving goals.
Tiller has a suite of Google Sheet templates available too, covering spending, saving, budgeting and net worth tracking, so that you can visualize your financial data immediately.
Of course, you can also build your own solutions to answer whatever questions you have.
It costs $79/year, which is tremendous value since you’re getting a fully customizable, automated personal finance tool.
Tiller is a third-party tool so you have to create an account with them, which is done securely through your Google account credentials.
This is what your homepage looks like, and where you add accounts or create new Google Sheet templates:
Once you add the bank accounts and credit cards you want to track, you can go ahead and create a new Google Sheet:
Click Create and the magic happens! ?
After a short while, you can click over to your new Google Sheet, populated with all of your transaction data!
We’ve setup categories to group our transactions, so that we can see how much we’re spending on different things at a high-level. For example, we group all restaurant expenses together into an “Eating Out” category, which allows us to see how much we spend eating out.
You want enough categories to differentiate items in a meaningful way, but not too many that you end up with too much granularity. The whole idea is to summarize transactions into something more manageable.
Each week my wife or I will jump into the Tiller Sheet and categorize any new transactions. It’s as simple as selecting the category from the drop-down menu in Transactions tab in the blank cell next to the transaction name:
You can even use Tiller’s new Autocat tool to now automatically categorize transactions for you.
I’m going to share our solution for tracking our spending habits.
It allows us to understand how we’re spending our money and identify ways to reduce it.
I created a summary table in our Tiller Google Sheet, which shows our family spending by category. It takes the data we’ve categorized in the transactions tab, which is automatically updated by Tiller, and summarizes it.
The transactions are summarized by categories in the rows, and by months across the columns. Columns A and B contain checkboxes, which I use to control which spending categories to show in my charts.
This table alone gives us more insight into our spending habits than anything the bank gives us. Every single transaction is included and categorized, by us not the bank.
You can create a table like this with the Google Sheets QUERY function, or using Pivot Tables in Google Sheets.
In my case, I’ve used a QUERY function in cell C3 to retrieve, aggregate and pivot my transaction data:
=QUERY(QUERY(Transactions!A1:O,"select C, sum(D)*-1 group by C pivot K"),"offset 1",0)I added the checkboxes in columns A and B, so there’s a way for my wife and I to choose categories to focus on.
The checkboxes can be individually checked or unchecked and they feed into other data tables that only show the data for the checked items.
Our mortgage, car lease and utility payments remain largely the same month-to-month. We know we have to pay them every month, so we don’t necessarily need to see them every time. (That’s not to say they’re not important, but trying to visualize all your categories at once will just clutter your charts to the point of being useless. )
However, seeing our discretionary spending — things like travel and eating out for example — helps us understand our spending habits and find ways to save more money in a healthy way.
We’re currently using two charts to track our spending habits:
The first is a monthly breakdown by category, showing actual spend this month (blue) against the average amount we spend in this category each month (red):
(Chart shows fictional data.)
The second is a look at our discretionary spending over the past few months, so we can see how selected categories are trending (chart shows fictional data):
The combination of the monthly category breakdown table and these two simple charts gives us tremendous insight into our spending habits.
Knowing how we’re spending our money gives us tremendous peace of mind.
It’s helping us to minimize our unnecessary spending and maximize our saving.
10 techniques to use when building budget templates in Google Sheets
A guide to the super useful QUERY function
Pivot Tables in Google Sheets: A Beginnerās Guide
How to use checkboxes in Google Sheets
Note: I’m not a financial expert and this post does not provide financial advice. It simply shows some techniques for working with and presenting data in Google Sheets.