Spreadsheets are one of the most flexible, accessible, and user-friendly tools we have for managing data. And Google Sheets has pioneered the transition from single-user offline spreadsheets to multi-user online spreadsheets.
Cloud-based spreadsheets such as Google Sheets are easy to share with others, allowing multiple co-workers to view and edit files together in real-time. Thankfully this means that sending a spreadsheet as an email attachment is now a thing of the past.
As a result, it’s easier to control your company’s data than it was in the past. Google Sheets are always up-to-date, they’re accessible from anywhere (as long as you’ve got an internet connection), and you can be sure that the entire team is accessing the same version.
While the shift to cloud-based software has made it easier to share data with colleagues, many of us still spend a lot of time gathering and collating information from different sheets and files.
There are many reasons for this.
Firstly, although online collaboration is great, you may not want to share the same spreadsheet with everyone on the team. If you’re a manager, you might need to collect data from colleagues’ personal files or multiple departments. Too many people working in one spreadsheet can be messy, and administrators often need to keep data separated for data protection reasons.
As well as data integrity and privacy issues, you don’t want one single file to become too large. Huge spreadsheets with multiple tabs are hard to navigate and easy to get lost in. Because it’s online software, the performance of Google Sheets may also be limited by your internet connection, and each file has a size limit of 5 million cells.
Combining data from multiple Google Sheets into one sheet can be tedious and time-consuming. Copy-pasting is a risky way to merge spreadsheets. As well as being slow, it’s prone to manual errors. ImportRange can work well inside one file, but if you’ve ever tried to use it to consolidate data from multiple Google Sheets files, you’ll know that it can generate errors.
A more reliable alternative to copy-pasting, ImportRange, or coding is Sheetgo: a no-code automation tool for spreadsheets. It lets you create connections between spreadsheets to push and pull data between different files and consolidate in Google Sheets.
This means you can combine data from different files and merge multiple Google Sheets into one automatically.