As I’ve grown, my values have changed and evolved.
Things that mattered to me in my twenties and early thirties don’t matter so much now.
As each year passes, what matters to me becomes clearer. A simple life, with a focus around family, regular outdoor exercise, and a good work routine is what I’m looking for.
For the past few years, my wife and I have nurtured a shared dream of moving our family to a small mountain town. Continue reading In Pursuit Of A Dream
I’ve recently returned from a fantastic week in San Francisco at Google’s Cloud Next ’19 conference, which is their annual Cloud conference for developers and vendors. It’s a huge event, with some 30,000+ attendees and 500 sessions.
Google made a 122 announcements, including some exciting developments relating to Google Sheets.
Here are the talks from the Google Cloud Next 19 conference that related to Google Sheets:
1. 30 Ways Google Sheets Can Help Your Company Uncover and Share Data Insights
If you only watch one session from next and you’re a Google Sheets user, then I’d recommend this one. It’s really well presented look at the capabilities of Google Sheets in the context of working with data and the Sheets team give plenty of sneak peeks into where the tool is going.
Here are the new features we can expect to see in the future:
Images in cells: allows you to add images anchored inside a cell, not just free-floating, and without needing to use the IMAGE function
Trim Whitespace: natively remove whitespace around data in cells, instead of having to use formulas
Slicers:slicers are controls to add filters to pivot tables and charts
Reports & Themes: features to make dashboard reports easier in Sheets
OnPrem data connectors: data connectors to other SQL databases to easily access data from Sheets
Connected sheets:Connected Sheets connect Sheets to BigQuery and use Sheets functionality, like pivot tables, formulas and charts, with millions or even billions of rows of data inside BigQuery. The presenters showed an incredible demonstration of running a pivot table on 128 million rows of data!
View and edit history of individual cells: see how cells have changed over time
Embedding Sheets in Docs and Slides
MS Office Editing: work on Office files straight from G Suite without having to convert file types
Legacy keyboard shortcuts
2. How to Grow a Spreadsheet into an Application
Most of us use spreadsheets beyond simple data tasks. We build to-do lists, address books, scheduling apps, bug trackers, etc. Eventually, however, there comes a time when you need something more robust than a standalone Google Sheet, and this talk explores that journey, from single Google Sheet to full-blown application.
3. How to Simplify Business Processes with G Suite
4. Google Docs: Taking Collaboration Beyond Real Time
5. Open Doors to ML: How AAA Leverages BQML and Google Sheets to Predict Call Volume
An interesting session looking at how AAA uses BigQuery and Machine Learning to create predictive models that everyone can access through the Google Sheets interface. It was fascinating to see how Google Sheets has been positioned as the final step of the big data/machine learning pipelines.
6. Bring Your Favorite Enterprise Apps to G Suite with the New G Suite Add-ons
For Add-On developers, there was a big announcement about the new G Suite Add-Ons, which should make developers lives easier:
The full library of sessions from Google Next 19 can be found over on the Google Cloud Platform and the G Suite channels.
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 🙂
In the studio with the Data Studio teamAndroid Robot!
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.
Use cases when spreadsheets make good applications……and times when they don’t make good applications!
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! ?
Google Sheets BigQuery connector
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:
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.
Scheduled Data Studio report
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:
Google Sheets announcements
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
Reports!Easily create beautiful reports, including Themes feature
See and Edit history of a cell
Embedding Sheets into Docs/Slides
And more…!
Google Sheets Reports featureAnalyzing millions of rows of BigQuery data directly in Google Sheets formula! ?
More to come…
9 AM – Product Keynote
Good to see G Suite get a lot of stage time!
BigQuery + Google Sheets! This is exciting!
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)
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.
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!
Example workflow built using Potens.io to review ad assets and run them through Cloud Vision API to flag inappropriate content, all atop BigQuery
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.
It’s a rock concert for geeks! ?
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)
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!
Digging the conference graphics on the side of the Moscone Center
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!
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:
Golden Gate Bridge from 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!
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!
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.
My sons are 1 and 3 years old and growing up quickly!
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:
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:
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 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 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:
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!
26 July 2018: I’ve been at the Google Next cloud conference this week, in San Francisco. They announced a ton of exciting new features and products for both G Suite and the Google Cloud Platform.
The Google Sheets product team announced a bunch of exciting new features coming soon to Google Sheets.
Here’s a brief recap:
5 million cells! (Sneak peek)
Nice! A big jump in the size of data we can work with in Sheets. This will open up Sheets for bigger data projects now.
Update December 2018: This feature has been released! Check the File sizes help page.
Slicers (sneak peek)
This is a great addition for those of us who build reports and dashboards. Slicers are like checkbox buttons we can add to pivot tables and charts to make them much more interactive from a user stand point.
You’ll be able to add a slicer for a given field so that a user can then filter to just see the data they want.
It’s great to see charts getting some love! It’s one area where Google Sheet has fairly limited functionality, but we’ll soon have much more granular control over how our charts look.
For example, the updates will include the option to color datapoints individually (as shown in this image):
Pivot tables recently got a facelift, with a new, more user-friendly UX.
Even more useful though, pivot tables now have the option to group data (for example to group dates into months, or quarters etc.) and drill-down on data (so you can select an aggregated record and see all the data behind it with a single click).
These are really, really strong updates to Pivot Tables and dramatically increase the power of pivot tables.
BigQuery Data Integration (sneak peek)
There’s been a huge buzz around BigQuery this week, so it was only natural that they announced a native connector for Sheets and BigQuery. It’s in beta pre-release at the moment.
I’ve enjoyed learning more about BigQuery this week and I’m really excited to start using it to build data pipelines involving Sheets and/or Data Studio.
Partner Integrations (sneak peek)
The team announced several new data integrations during the session. They spent time discussing what they’re working on to bring data from web services into Sheets so you can analyze it.
Three new integrations were announced:
Salesforce and Sheets
You’ll soon be able to export Salesforce data into Sheets with a single click. Salesforce will also be rolling out a feature where you can work on your data in a Google Sheet that is embedded inside of Salesforce.
Sheets saved in Box
You’ll soon be able to work with Google Docs but save the files into your Box account, i.e. use Box instead of Drive as your cloud storage. This makes a lot of sense if you’re already setup on the Box platform.
The team did a live demo showing the collaborative features live from a Box hosted Google Slide deck. Super slick!
SAP to Sheets
You’ll soon be able to export directly from SAP to Sheets.
Other notable updates in the works
> Text to columns will soon support fixed width splits, which is a useful upgrade.
> Continuing improvement of the Explore feature, which lets users ask questions about their data and uses natural language machine learning to extract answers and suggest insights.
> Improved printing options to meet enterprise needs.
> Images in cells, which stay with that cell even when you move it or insert other rows or columns. Currently you can insert floating images or use the IMAGE function to insert into a cell. Neither is ideal however, so this is a nice touch.
The session recording
Check out the recording of the session from the Google Next 18 conference:
