Google Sheets
Table of Contents
About Google Sheets 2
Access Google Sheets 2
Google Sheets Home Page 2
Create a New Spreadsheet 3
Name the Presentation 3
Sorting Data 4
Add Another Column 4
Create a Formula to Find Unique Email Addresses 4
Explore Other Formulas 5
Countif Solution 5
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About Google Sheets
Sheets is Google’s answer to Microsoft Excel. It can do complex
number-crunching on rows and columns of information. While
Sheets can easily sort data, it can also make an easy task of many
mundane operations on data that you might have to perform.
Screen elements of Google Sheets is shown in the figure below.
This tutorial will be working with Google Forms data from a
previous tutorial.
Access Google Sheets
To get to Sheets from any Google page, click the app launcher at
the top right and click the Sheets icon.
NOTE: The app launcher can be customized in terms of icon
location, so the location of your Sheets icon may be in a different
spot in the list.
If you are using Sheets for the first time, you may need to click
the More link at the bottom of the app launcher window.
Google Sheets Home Page
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Create a New Spreadsheet
From the Sheets home page you can click once to create a blank spreadsheet, create a spreadsheet from
a template, or open recent spreadsheet. To create a new spreadsheet simply click the Blank template
icon.You will see the following.
Name the Presentation
Click the area that says Untitled presentation
on the upper left to name the presentation (or click
File and choose Rename).
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Sorting Data
Data can be easily sorted by hovering your mouse on the column heading for the column you wish to
sort on. A dropdown menu option will appear on the right side. Select the Sort sheet option that best
suits your needs. In the following figure, the “Timestamp” column “A” is being sorted from A to Z.
Add Another Column
Add another column to your data where you can do some computation. In the right-most column (G),
add a new column by clicking the column dropdown (above) and select “Insert 1 right” option. Column
(H) will appear.
Create a Formula to Find Unique Email Addresses
In the newly created column we will enter a formula for finding all of the students submitting work. Click
cell H2 and enter the following formula. Just as in Excel, formulas must begin with and equal sign (=).
=unique(B2:B11)
This will find all the unique values that exist in the email address column (B) between cell 2 and cell 11.
However, what happens when the data set grows? We will want to modify the formula a bit. Re-edit the
formula in H2 to be the following:
=unique(B2:B)
This will update the spreadsheet automatically as new items are added.
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Explore Other Formulas
If you don’t know the name of the given functions, such as “unique” simply select “Insert” in the Google
Sheets menu bar, followed by “Function” and “More”. A new page will appear. Scroll through or simply
use your browsers “Search” option to find the function you are needing. Functions can also be nested if
you need even more functionality.
If you were curious about how many times a student entered a posting, you might consider a “countif”
function. Walk through the steps to see if you can create this formula. A typical view of Sheets’ help
system is below. See examples when you click to “Learn more”.
Countif Solution
Create a new column “I” to the right of column “h” that holds the “unique” formula that was used. Build
the following formula in cell I2:
=countif(B2:B,H2)
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