Blog

Conference Recap

Check out the best Google Sheets and G Suite videos here: Google Sheets Sessions From Cloud Next ’19 Conference

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Friday, April 12th (Post-conference)

The conference may be over but I have a little time left in San Francisco. Today I had the opportunity to visit the Googleplex in Mountain View and record a video with the Data Studio team 🙂

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Thursday, April 11th (Day 3)

Day 3 at Next ‘19 recap from Google: A look back at an amazing week

1.35 PM – Growing a spreadsheet into an application

Really interesting talk about the life cycle of a spreadsheet, and how it grows into an application, and how you can move beyond the spreadsheet to a more robust, scalable solution.

11 AM – Data Studio meetup

A bunch of Data Studio enthusiasts and Googlers got together to discuss the product and the roadmap. Great to get some insight into where it’s going. They’re certainly investing heavily in Data Studio!

9 AM – Simplify Business Processes with G Suite session

Some really interesting use-cases of businesses adopting G Suite, and how it’s simplifying and streamlining their processes.

The BigQuery to Google Sheets connector is getting a lot of love! ?

The team also shared some innovative and wide-ranging examples of App Maker apps. For example, here’s an App Maker app that can recognize text in a photo and transfer that into a Google Doc for you!

It’s the final day of Google Next 19!

Video replay of yesterday’s Sheets session!

The video replay of yesterday’s Google Sheets session is now on YouTube. This is highly recommended if you have 45 minutes. In it, the Product Managers from Google share the Google Sheets roadmap:

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Wednesday, April 10th (Day 2)

Day 2 recap on the Google Cloud Blog

4.40 PM – Developer Keynote LIVE

Watch live here

3.30 PM – Data Studio

Lots of updates from the Data Studio team and a great demonstration of how quick the tool is to analyze a hundred million rows of data, when using the new BigQuery BI Engine between BigQuery and Data Studio.

The other big updates included a sophisticated chart drill-down and cross-filtering features and more insight into the scheduled distribution of reports.

It’s very clear that Google are investing heavily in this tool!

2.10 PM – BQML and Google Sheets

This was a really interesting session on how AAA utilize BigQuery and the new BigQuery ML (Machine Learning) tool to predict volume at call centers. They use the BigQuery connector to bring the analytical capabilities into Sheets, to open access to the model to many more people across the organization.

Fascinating stuff!

12.30 PM – Google Sheets Session

Wow! So many big features in the pipeline:

How we work with data in Google Sheets is changing. Some of the biggest announcements were (some available in beta today, some coming in the future):

• Connected Sheets for BigQuery (see Product Keynote below)
• On Prem data connectors – Oracle, MySQL, Postgres databases direct into Sheets
• Native remove duplicates feature
• Slicers
• Reports!Easily create beautiful reports, including Themes feature
• See and Edit history of a cell
• Embedding Sheets into Docs/Slides
• And more…!

More to come…

9 AM – Product Keynote

Good to see G Suite get a lot of stage time!

Probably the most exciting feature for Sheets users is a new feature in #GoogleSheets, called Connected Sheets, which lets you collaborate on up to 10 billion rows of BigQuery data right from within Sheets (without needing SQL!) –> more details and apply for beta access now

Other big announcements included:

• G Suite integration with Google Assistant (beta)
• G Suite Add-ons (beta coming soon)
• Office editing in Docs, Slides and Sheets (generally available)

For a full run-down of all the new features and products coming to G Suite: check it out here on the G Suite blog

Watch it live here –> Next on Air

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Tuesday, April 9th (Day 1)

Day 1 Recap

Day 1 was all about enterprise, enterprise, enterprise. Google Cloud CEO, Thomas Kurian, announced a new product, Anthos, available for managing multi-cloud solutions.

For me personally, this enterprise stuff is really interesting but not directly relevant. The highlight of the day was meeting a bunch of great folks and sharing ideas, beginning by serendipitously sitting next to a data scientist from MailChimp for the opening keynote.

Some links from day 1:

Google Cloud Next ‘19: Welcome to the future of digital transformation

Day 1 at Next ‘19: Hybrid cloud, full-stack serverless, open-source partnerships, and more (the official recap)

Tomorrow, the focus is more on product and developers!

There are sessions focused on Sheets (new announcements hopefully!), combining BigQuery with Sheets and finally, Data Studio. So I should have a lot more substantive updates to share here on the blog tomorrow 🙂

4PM – Checking out the Vendor Hall

The scale of this conference is pretty overwhelming!

1 PM – 3.30 PM – G Suite Product Feedback session

One of the benefits of becoming a Google Developer Expert is that I get to meet some of the Google Project Managers and give product feedback directly.

This afternoon we had a big round table with most of the G Suite and Apps Script GDEs and the respective Product Managers and Developer Relations team from Google.

It was a lively discussion and great to see Google listening to all our feedback. There’s lots of exciting stuff in the pipeline, some of which will be announced at Next, some later this year.

Unfortunately I can’t share any specifics now, but I’ll certainly share anything that gets announced at the sessions tomorrow!

11 AM – The Non-Engineer Guide to BigQuery

Interesting presentation, although totally different to what I expected.

I was expecting more of an introduction to using BigQuery and how to approach it for product managers, analysts, managers etc. (i.e. non-engineers).

Instead it was an demonstration of a super cool tool Viant have built on top of BigQuery to democratize access to data across their organization. Their tool – potens.io – allows you to build workflows to query data in BigQuery including business logic, API integration and script outputs (like emails if certain results are obtained). Interesting stuff for sure!

I look forward to diving into BigQuery (someday soon!) and start creating content here.

9 AM – Keynote

I managed to get into the hall for the keynote this year. The sheer number of people filing in and out of the Moscone center was still overwhelming.

Sundar Pichai (CEO of Google) kicked things off before new Cloud CEO, Thomas Kurian, took over and laid out his vision for Google Cloud.

Unsurprisingly, and understandably given Google’s position in the cloud race behind Amazon and Microsoft, the focus was entirely on Enterprise solutions and multi-cloud solutions. Not much mention of G Suite…yet.

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Monday, April 8th (T – 1 Day)

6.30 PM – Next ’19 Community Dinner

Tonight Google hosted a community dinner for the Google Developer Experts in their offices downtown.

It was great to catch up with fellow Apps Script and G Suite GDEs and hear what everyone’s up to.

Everyone is using the CLASP, the Command Line Apps Script interface, with their code editors of choice. This allows for a much improved development environment over the native Apps Script one. And we’re all waiting to see if there’s any vision on the Apps Script roadmap and a timeline when the new runtime engine will come in (which will make scripts run a lot faster).

1 PM

Lunch in Chinatown with David Siegel, CEO and co-founder of Glide Apps. Glide Apps lets you turn your Google Sheets into mobile apps, with no coding required.

The Next conference starts in earnest for me tomorrow (it’s the community summit today).

12.30 PM:

Some early G Suite stats being shared at the community events today (I’m not there, so reporting this from Twitter):

• 1.5B+ App Users
• 90M+ students with an Edu license
• 5M+ paying G Suite Businesses (up 1M from last year)

If you’re unable to attend Next, the Keynote sessions are available to watch live online here: https://cloud.withgoogle.com/next/sf/

9 AM:

Registration day! If you’re attending and you have a chance to collect your badge today then I highly recommend. Tomorrow the lines will be pretty long…

I’ve got my badge!

The billboards all around the SOMA district of San Francisco are plastered with the conference ads. It’s crazy how big this event is. I’ve heard there’ll north of thirty thousand attendees. Wow!

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Sunday, April 7th (T – 2 Days)

The Google Next 19 conference is almost here!

I arrived in San Francisco this morning after an early flight. It’s been a beautiful day so I caught up with a buddy and we did a great walk around the city parks. This, the view from near the top of Buena Vista park:

I’m really excited to catch up with friends, meet awesome new folks and hear all about the Google product road maps this week!

This is what the Google Sheets team announced last year:

• 5 million cells ✔️ We got that earlier this year!
• Slicers ? Not yet! They’re still in the works but I’m sure there’ll be an update this week!
• Better Charts ✔️ We got some nice upgrades like editing individual data points.
• Pivot Table Upgrades ✔️
• Big Query Data Integration ✔️ Available to G Suite Business, Enterprise and Education users
• There were a bunch of other upgrades and new features announced!

I’ll be sure to share the announcements from this year’s Google Sheets session here in this blog!

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Friday, April 5 (T – 4 Days)

Google Next 19, the big annual conference from Google Cloud and G Suite, is just around the corner. It starts on Tuesday 9th April, although there are things happening on Sunday and Monday beforehand.

I have my ticket and I’m flying to San Francisco on Sunday. I’m really excited!

Last year was my first time at Next, and it was an eye-opening experience. With over 20,000 attendees and hundreds of talks, it was inspiring and overwhelming in equal measure. It was great to hear first-hand from the Google Sheets team on the roadmap, and I’m looking forward to new updates this year.

This year, with experience from last year fresh in my mind, I’ve scheduled meetings ahead of time, been a little less ambitious with my schedule and packed a portable battery charger!

My plan is to update this post daily with news and announcements from Next 19.

I’ll also be posting lots of updates to Twitter, under the #GoogleNext19 hashtag.

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:

2018 highlights

Online courses

• This year I created and launched three new courses:
  
  1. Data Analysis in Google Sheets
  2. Google Sheets Bootcamp
  3. Apps Script Blastoff! (a free course)

• In terms of the overall school metrics, The Collins School of Data continues to grow and has now seen over 9,000 students enroll in a course. (Thank you! 🙏)

Website

• Continued growth of this website, benlcollins.com, which now sees over 200k pageviews/month and 125k users/month, and will reach around 1.7 million pageviews for the year 🤯
• What’s been really pleasing has been to see it grow over the course of the year:
  
• I published 22 pieces of new content on the site, which is less than previous years but there were some long posts among them. I was proud of the content I published this year, particularly these three posts:
  
  • Slow Google Sheets? 🐢 Here are 27 ideas to try today
  • Pivot Tables 101: A Beginner’s Guide
  • The complete guide to simple automation in Google Sheets, using Macros

• I finally filled a glaring gap in my tutorials by creating a comprehensive Beginner Guide to Google Sheets
• The social media statistics article, about how to import social media stats into Google Sheets with IMPORT formulas, continues to have a lively debate in the comments section, with nearly 300 comments and counting. This has been super fun to see.
• I also wrote about how we manage our family finances with Google Sheets

Conferences

• I attended the Craft and Commerce Conference in Boise, Idaho in June 2018. I met some interesting folks and picked up some super relevant knowledge from Mariah Coz‘s workshop on course launches
• I attended the Google Next 18 Conference in San Francisco in July 2018. I finally got to meet a whole bunch of folks I’ve been chatting with online for years, in person, which was great. The Google Sheets product team announced lots of cool new features coming to Google Sheets (some of which are now live, like the 5 million cell limit)

Investing in Design in 2018

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.

Stamping my personality on the office

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?):

Saving the best for last, non-work highlights included:

• Watching my boys grow! It’s the most rewarding and challenging thing I’ve ever done

  

• A week hiking in Tasmania with my brother way back in January
• A bonus weekend hanging out and hiking in San Francisco with my brother when the Google and Microsoft conferences happened in adjacent weeks. We did a fantastic 16-mile hike around San Fran:
• A weekend hiking in Boulder, Colorado with my wife Lexi. We both felt super energized and happy after a weekend of hiking in the mountains. I absolutely love it out there!
• Getting back to a semi-regular running schedule since September, after a health scare earlier in the year (see below). Still far short of where I want to be, but I’m making forward progress again.
• The crazy walk we did at Brooker Creek Preserve, where almost the entire 5 mile trail was between ankle and knee deep under water!
• I read 20 books this year, which is my highest tally since having children. I attribute some of that to the increased amount of time spent convalescing when I was sick. Highlights this year included:
  

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  A Gentleman in Moscow – Amor Towles

  An absolutely fantastic read about a Russian Count under house arrest in a Moscow hotel

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  The Worst Journey in the World – Apsley Cherry-Gerrard

  A classic tale of hardship and true adventure (my second read through)

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  The Rise and Fall of the Dinosaurs – Steve Brusette

  An eminently readable romp through the world of dinosaurs and paleontologists

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  Bad Blood – John Carreyou

  An absorbing story of greed, deception and ultimate downfall

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  Lost and Founder – Rand Fishkin

  A fascinating, honest look at the startup world

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Challenges in 2018

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.

Looking forwards to 2019

My goals for 2019:

• Create a follow-up Apps Script course to the free Apps Script Blastoff! course I launched in December. I plan to launch this new course in March 2019
• Create two other courses. The shortlist at the moment includes: 1) “Beyond Sheets” on what to do when your data outgrows Google Sheets, 2) Regular Expressions in Google Sheets, 3) a Data Studio course, and 4) Google Sheets for Educators
• Attend the Google Next 19 conference (give me a shout if you’ll be there!)
• Continue to grow the community on this site and the online school
• Hold more webinars in 2019, on Google Sheets and Apps Script topics
• Personally, I want to deepen my digital analytics and marketing knowledge, particularly GTM, GA and paid Ads, and also continue experimenting with data science and Google Cloud topics. Specifically, I’ll try to find time to work through this book: Data Science on the Google Cloud Platform

Thank you

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

Previous years

2017 in review and a look forward to 2018

2016 in review and a look forward to 2017

2015 in review and a look forward to 2016