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I’ve been playing around a lot in Google Documents lately. Spreadsheets in Google Documents are perfect for keeping Family Budgets etc. because they’re centrally based and can be edited and changed by multiple users as and when they need to be.

However, what happens if you need to create a personal budget for use only by you and still use some of the information from another ‘file’ in Google Documents?

Here’s what I found works. If you have other formulae drop a comment and share!

Well, it turns out that you can import data across multiple Google Documents to streamline processes and make life generally more bearable and managed.

Note If you do not have permission/access to the document you’re bringing data from this will not work.

Every spreadsheet in Google Documents has a key, this is similar to a uniquely assigned file name.

Take a look at the address bar of the Google Document Spreadsheet with the data you need in it. It should look something like this: (some letters have been changed)

https://spreadsheets.google.com/ccc?key=0At3Haem3Sd88dDJ0dUgxa3VTWGFkQUhCNzQxanVMemc&hl=en

I put the key in bold, italics for you, in case the “key=” wasn’t enough of a clue for you 🙂

You’ll need to highlight and copy this key.

In your second spreadsheet you’ll need a formula, I used the importrange but I’m sure you can use others.

=importrange(“0At3Haem3Sd88dDJ0dUgxa3VTWGFkQUhCNzQxanVMemc“, “Sheet1!d21”)

In plain english:

=importrange(“Document Key”, “Worksheet name!cell number”)

This brings the data from another file (static or dynamic cell data) and loads it into your file and your cell.

It’s really handy!

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