Create a Course Outline in Google Sheets

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About this Tutorial

Wanted to share with members this course outline I am using for my own course making process. I outlined the course then added a bunch of cool little stats to help see my progress and keep me on a certain pace of video creation.

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Featured Formulas

CONCAT() CONCATENATE() COUNTA() COUNTIF() IF() ISBLANK() REPT() ROUND() SUMIF()

Video Transcript

<div>00:00 Hi, so I am creating a new course in Better Sheets. It's about Google Sheet Add-ons.

It's a really risky course actually because I'm not going to release the actual course unless the add-on is published. 00:13 I'm going to actually get in the course I'm creating an add-on publishing and showing you every step of the way, but I wanted to share with you some. 00:22 This outline that I made sort of has kept me motivated and kept me it's kept me on track very well. 00:29 And I wanted to share with you a little bit the extra stuff that I put into it to sort of just make it fun and interesting. 00:35 I have outlined the, the course I have the, intro video for each section.

I have the name of each section or what I'm gonna, the topic I'm gonna cover in that video. 00:46 I have some estimated minutes.

And then as I check off, and I also have a check box here, and you can see I'm not yet done with this course because I have not gotten marketplace approval for the add-on that I'm making in the course yet. 00:58 So if, if this add-on does not get made and doesn't get published, I'm gonna be deleting all the videos and, and wiping away all evidence that this course existed, but this video that you're watching will probably still exist. 01:14 So that'll be interesting.

So, so I wanted to share with this outlo- share - you- with you this outline not the outline of the course, I meant sort of this sheet that I made, and I wanted to share with you how I'm using it, and I think it can be used- I think it can be used really well 01:32 for, obviously, creating an online video course, cause that's how I made it, but also, like, if you are running a workshop, and you have sort of bulleted section- sections of your workshop, and you know there's some sort of preamble things you need to get across to someone, and you're like, I wanna 01:49 keep you on track and get you the prerequisites for each section before they happen, you can do that with this and sort of release- send this Google sheet for someone to copy you before they take your webinar or- or workshop. 02:01 Or creating sort of any project that is in multiple steps and you have multiple things to do I don't know if this is really that great for multiple people to use, but if I'm using it myself, I'm like, I wanna add a little extra stuff to stay motivated, and there's two things that I think help me 02:19 stay motivated.

One is having the full outline so that it's very simple. It's not easy to make these videos, but it's simple too. 02:27 I know what I'm gonna make next. I know what this video leads into. I know what I'm gonna cover in this video, and it's editable very easily. 02:36 I can just insert a new line here and add this. But there's a second part of this. That absolutely helps with motivation, and that's seeing what I've done. 02:45 Seeing what I've accomplished. Not just sitting at the beginning of the course.

I think, I think at the beginning of a project, it's sort of the easiest part, because you could sort of leave it at any time. 02:56 There's no stakes, there's no risk. You're like, well, I haven't started it, so I won't start. But if you do start, and you're like in the middle of something, do you ever want to stop, and it becomes sort of a an emotional thing to either stop or continue. 03:10 And with this, it helps me actually keep going stay motivated, because I can see what I have done. I can see how far I have to go. 03:21 Right now.

I'm using count if to count just the checkboxes. So I'm counting and be if it's a true. Checkboxes is just a visual representation of true or false. 03:32 So all the falses are not counted. And all of these words here are not counted. Only true is counted. And that, is just how many I've done. 03:44 Then I am counting just everything in the C column from six down. So I didn't add any notes at the bottom. 03:52 I just have the section names. So I'm just counting those and, so I have potentially 46 lessons.

I had at 1.56, I think, or 57, but, I am combining these last things into just one video each. 04:06 This used to be like six videos. So that just counts the number of things I have to do total. So I can see right here 27 out of 46 and I don't really want to do the math all the time and I, I, personally didn't think that a percentage progress bar was appropriate. 04:28 It's hard to tell when you have all these little micro sections, sort of atomic sections.

It's hard to tell on a progress bar actually how far you have to go, especially making a video course. 04:42 Where you have an amount of time that you estimate. So I'm estimating actually each of these video lengths here, but actually I'm estimating these that I've not done yet. 04:53 The ones that I have done, I literally go in here and it's easy to just type in a new number that I just edited and make it the real number that I actually did do it. 05:01 So, Two things I have done here.

One, instead of a progress bar that shows a percentage, I have repeated however many taped so that A1 is repeated with a checkbox that is a check-off. 05:17 Then I have repeated all of the ones I haven't done, which is just A2, the total. Minus A1, what I have done, what's left is what I haven't done, and I repped our EPT, repeat, or repetition that a square box, a square gray box. 05:36 And now is a visual representation, right? I don't have to scroll through all of this and see, okay, I'm up to lesson 27. 05:43 I, I don't have to like do this mental math of 46 minus 28.

I can look here and say, okay, I have this many done and I have this many to do. 05:53 Like, and I know that each one of those is a task instead of whatever percentage this is total. You could also add percentage. 06:01 That's never a problem, right?. I just didn't do it in this. In addition to however many I have, it was hard to tell early on that like some videos were seven, some three, some nine, and then I wanted to see like all these sections were like adding up. 06:19 So I, I also summed up some with some if.

If it's true, if I've checked it off, I'm adding up all of the minutes of the course that I've done that I've taped. 06:32 So that's 116 minutes. And then I have the sum of the total. So I have a total of 183 minutes. 06:39 I also wanted to make sure that this was not too much. The spreadsheet automation 101 course, if you take that on better sheets here, better sheet.co it's three hours and And I think three hours is like a good amount of time to stay in the mindset of that particular topic, that particular  07:00 thing. This one, when it got to.

Three hours, I was like, that's a little much. 3.1 hours. And actually it was much more. 07:10 It was I was estimating these videos after like down here. These videos were way, way, way longer. I had a much higher estimated time and I was like well over four hours and I was like, this kind of topic should not be covered in. 07:24 4 plus hours. Maybe over a great amount of time and maybe with a more advanced course could be. But I didn't think this was going to be very advanced in much in any way. 07:36 I'm not actually showing you how to code.

That is especially automation 101 is all about App Script . This is really all about from the moment you have an ad. 07:44 And I was like, if I have more than it's 4 hours, it's going to be brutal to sell that to claim like it's easy. 07:56 You can do an entire Ruby on Rails introduction from basically nothing to installing Ruby on Rails and then creating. And you can do an app in 4 hours easily. 08:07 And no, nothing. That's from zero to something.

This was just like, this course is going to be just following along step by step. 08:15 And there's not many steps I can personally do all of this well within 3 hours. Most of the time I'm talking about the process in telling- explaining to you what I sort of have previously gotten into and previously had a roadblock. 08:31 And now it's so much easier. And here's how you get around that roadblock. So I was like, I gotta get this down to 3 hours. 08:38 So that was very helpful.

Seeing these minutes, seeing the minutes that I've done, as I've racked up, I was like- right about between the time that I had done 60 minutes of video and 90 minutes of video, I think that was mentally the toughest. 08:54 And this number really helped having these minutes. And seeing I am almost halfway done. Like 90- 80 minutes and 95 minutes, I think, yeah, was halfway done of 183 minutes, right? 09:10 90, 90, 95 minutes. And being 60 to 90, oh god, that was tough. I was like, I gotta keep going, keep going. 09:20 And each moment, each one of these checked off added more and more.

Or, you know, minutes to that. And I was like, okay, we're getting this one was a nine minute video, nine minute video. 09:32 I think this one at ten minutes is the longest. And that's probably why it was tough. This, I think this video was the toughest one. 09:43 Probably because it was so long, right?. And then. Might have been it. But I think this, this outline can help you. 09:50 And also I just designed it in a nice, nice way where you have the nice way. I don't think this is brutally the best way, but it's just, you know, for your own personal use. 10:00 Add your video here.

If you're doing something like me, where you're recording loom videos, I record on loom. And then I download and then I. 10:06 And I put up on Udemy. And then all of the loom videos I also put on bettersheets.co. So I need that link to be linked to this here so I can put it on Udemy. 10:17 So I have a video here list. You can put, you know, again, if you have loom or maybe some notes . 10:24 And then I added the last, The only thing I added was this lesson one, two, three.

If there was a text in the C column, so I wanted to make a lesson number and I wanted to, basically I couldn't, I saw the number of lessons here, 46. 10:43 But I couldn't relate when I was scrolling down. One of which lesson each one was. So the last thing I added was this lesson and then the number . 10:52 And I'm using if is blank to know if there is actually any text in the C column. Then I'm concatenating the word lesson, a space, and then I'm using count all. 11:05 What I'm doing is, I'm using this C6 to C6 in this first one.

The first C6 is a dollar sign . 11:13 So it's, I put a dollar sign in from the C, a dollar sign in from the six. Now as I copied and pasted that down, that side of the colon stayed the same and then the C6 on the right side. 11:26 Changed. So if you see lesson two, it's count all C6 colon C7. And if you look all the way down here, it is C6 colon C27. 11:37 So that changed as I copy pasted. And so counted differently. So the counts are automatic.

Even if I add an, even if I add another thing here, I can add another section. 11:54 And you see automatically they all realign this is now count. They're all counted differently. This is lesson. 19. I can put in, you know, estimated two minutes. 12:04 And now all of, all of the numbers. Should be different up here. So should be. Was that 47? Oh, I don't think I named it. 12:17 19. Yeah, it is here. Okay. Let's see if we delete that. Yeah, 46 lessons. Okay. I. Oh, that was weird. 12:29 Yeah, so you saw the difference there. That is different. Did this rounding here to figure out?

I just for some reason, I wanted hours as well, but I didn't want to do two more cells or two more rows. 12:43 So I put them in the same one and I did round and I instead of concatenate . I used the embersand here with an of between two rounds of rounding a three, rounding a four and one I'm dividing by sixty here and adding one place. 13:00 The places are just one place I'm rounding to. So that 1.9 and 3.1. I th- I thought it was a little messy if I did two. 13:09 You can see that here. 1.93 of 3.05 hours.

Eh, it's a bit, for just a glance I needed just one place and I thought no places was a little too, that would have been two of three, right? 13:24 Okay. 1.9 of 3.1 hours. It's 183, 3.1 hours. 46 lessons. These numbers are things that I also wanted to make sure I had when I did promotional material. 13:35 If I do promotional material, if I create this course. Right? These are all really good stats to have for tweets, for Instagram, for Facebook posts, for even just descriptions and stuff. 13:52 Yeah, so I'm sharing this course outline with you. Use it.

You can go down below if you're a better sheets member. 14:01 I'm better in watching this on bettersheets.co. You can get it down below. Just copy it to your.. Cool drive. And yeah, I just thought it'd be fun to share this sort of nicely done. 14:15 I mean, it's helped me greatly to keep motivated and stay on course as I have to take five or two to five days off at a time because of this sort of approval process takes many, many days. 14:27 Between them.

Alright, thanks for watching and wish me luck that this add-on is made and you get to have a whole new course on better sheets. 14:36 Bye.</div>