Category: General

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)

  ---

  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

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’ll be much more functional and elegant than the data validation drop-down method or checkbox methods you can use at the moment.

Charting upgrades (sneak peek)

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):

Update January 2019: This feature has been released! Check this article on how to add custom formatting to individual data point.

Pivot Table upgrades (recently launched)

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:

Happy New Year to you all!

‘Max Q‘ is a term used in rocketry to denote the moment during a rocket flight when aerodynamic stress on the rocket’s airframe is at it’s maximum. It’s one of the early milestones of any flight, and one of the most dangerous to boot. Astronauts and engineers both breathe a sigh of relief when the rocket passes this point. Engines, which have been throttled back to 60 – 70% of capacity during this phase, are once again opened up and the great fire-breathing, bone-rattling tin can accelerates rapidly upwards again, on its way to space.

Well, the summer of 2017 felt like ‘max Q’ for our family. We had a second baby boy in late May (he’s brilliant!), relocated from DC to Florida in early July, sold a house and bought a house, prepared for our first hurricane in August (that was stressful!) and had a to-do list longer than our arm, in fact, all our arms combined.

Through this, I did what I could, when I could, to keep the ball rolling with my business. I launched my second course, Data Cleaning and Pivot Tables in Google Sheets, in June, although almost all of the work was completed prior to my son’s arrival in May.

Since October, the throttle has been fully open again on the business and things are moving along nicely. I launched my third course, Advanced Formulas 30 Day Challenge, in mid December, and had over 1k students sign up in the first week.

2017 highlights

Continue reading 2017 in review and a look forward to 2018

Happy New Year to you all!

If 2015 was a year of huge change, then 2016 was more incremental, building on the foundations of 2015. I still tried lots of different things – different gigs, different projects, different tools – but I’ve found creating apps and solving data problems on the Google platform is my sweet spot of skills, experience and enjoyment.

2016 highlights:

On this site

Investing so much time and effort into this site really started to pay off over the course of 2016.

Over 2,500 of you have subscribed to my email list and enjoyed a free copy of my ebook: Spice Up Your Sheet Life.

Midway through the year, I passed 100k pageviews, then 150k pageviews and am now close to 200k.

Several posts have garnered some really great commentary from readers, adding tons of value to the original post. This one in particular has 112 comments and counting!

These have been the most popular posts of 2016:

• Creating a dynamic dashboard in Google Spreadsheets to track sales for a digital product launch
• 10 techniques for building dashboards in Google Sheets
• Everything you ever wanted to know about Sparklines in Google Sheets
• Beginner guide to coding with Google Apps Script
• Histograms and Normal Distribution Curves in Google Sheets

In addition, this post about Google’s new data visualization and dashboard tool, Data Studio, was the most “viral” post of 2016, getting a huge (for me) number of shares and views on the day I published it:

In addition to those posts mentioned above, I also really enjoyed creating this animated data visualization of Washington D.C.’s temperatures since the 1980’s, using Google’s Visualization API:

Client highlights

Over the past year, I’ve specialized in providing G Suite and Apps Script services to clients, building dashboards, apps and tools to solve problems and save clients time. I’ve really enjoyed these projects and have worked with some great clients. I look forward to continuing into 2017 and focussing even further on custom Apps Script solutions.

In addition, I really enjoyed teaching two more data analytics courses for General Assembly in Washington, D.C.. The students were great in both groups and it’s a real privilege to teach them, and see such rapid progress in 10 weeks.

For private clients, I taught a number of data visualization workshops, focussing on Excel and Tableau, in Minnesota, Virginia and California.

I learnt a ton this year about running my own consulting business.

One of the biggest lessons was one client disappearing off the face of the earth when it came to settling their invoice. Despite repeated calls and emails, I’ve heard nothing. It wasn’t a huge amount of money, but it taught me a valuable lesson about trust, respect and how I price my services.

Want to work with me in 2017? Let me know and I’ll be in touch.

Goals for 2017

January is an exciting time of the year: a chance to set ambitious goals and a strategy for getting there.

The one big goal for last year that I failed to complete was releasing my digital course on building dashboards with Google Sheets and Data Studio. However, I’ve not stopped working on it, and it’ll be even better when I do release it. I’ve now recorded enough material that I’m confident of a launch in Q1 of 2017. Sign up to my email list for news and an early-bird offer when it launches.

Specifically, my goals for 2017:

• Launch my Google Sheets & Data Studio dashboard course
• Launch Edition 2 of my free ebook: Spice Up Your Sheet Life, with more interesting tips and tricks for working with Google Sheets
• Launch two other digital products
• Make a huge push with Apps Script, to deepen my knowledge & experience, and create detailed articles for this site. One quick way to measure this is to see what my GitHub profile looks like by the year-end, hopefully something more like this:



• Continue to create in-depth articles and tutorials for this site, aiming for 1 – 2 posts a week
• Continue to provide great service and solutions for my clients, in the G Suite & Apps Script ecosystem

It’s going to take hard work, focus and dedication to achieve all of these goals, but it’s as easy as ABC*

*Always Be Coding

By this, I mean being productive and efficient, always moving forwards and minimizing distractions (beware the Shiny Object Syndrome!). It’s crucial as a freelancer to create efficient workflows and systems, and to stay organized.

Well, that should do it. I better get back to work 😉

Happy New Year and all the best for 2017!

Cheers,
Ben