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Google Sheet Basics - The Absolute Basics

About this Tutorial

Let's start at the basics of Google Sheets. Where every beginner spreadsheet expert starts!

Video Transcript

 Hey, sheet shakers. It's big sheeter here. No, my name's Andrew. Probably need to get a better intro there. This video is all about the basics, the absolute basics of a spreadsheet and Google sheet. So when you create a new sheet or spreadsheet it's gonna have sheets in it. It's gonna have one sheet, actually, it's gonna look like.

it's gonna have a table, and you have a number of sheets inside of this spreadsheet. And each one of these sheets is a table. The table is cells, which are ordered in rows and columns. Every new sheet that you make, it's gonna have 26 columns and 1000 rows. We know this because if we go all the way over to.

the column is labeled Z, so all the columns are labeled as their. Letter, but if you don't know what number this is, like, you can say how many, how many columns do we have? Oh, one easy way to find out is to do a little equals column and then parenthesis and parentheses, and that'll give you the number of the columns.

So you can even copy paste this and you can see, so sometimes you might not remember what number U is. It's the 21st letter of the alphabet, and it's the 21st. In a spreadsheet, every new sheet you make, you can click over here on the plus sign and create a new sheet. It's gonna be named sheet and the, the word sheet, and then a number.

It'll be after whatever number you have. So I've made this video a couple times and you can see it. It says 14 here wherever you are.  in the sheet. In the tabs. It'll create a sheet right after it. So you can see right here, number 16. So these are all out of order, right? Because it, it's just adding wherever I am.

It's gonna be adding after that. . So what can you do in cells? Well, in cells you can do four things. You can write text, you can do math, you can combine that text in some funky ways, and then you can also do formulas. I'm gonna show you text right now so you can write any text, and it's gonna look like that when you originally do it.

Aerial default 10 font size, it'll be black. I have some other videos that are really cool about how, what to do to make your initial sheets better so you can go and check out those videos. They include things like changing the text to hashtag 4, 4 44. That's like a lighter black that's not so contrasty.

And then also using something like sheet dot.  to create a new sheet. Really quick productivity things to make your life easier, but back to what you can do in sell. So you can write any text. You can also do math. And in order to do math, you have to use the equal sign. Then you can do like 34 plus 56.

You can also do 45 times 34. And that's 90, that's 1530. You can do division divided by that. If it's a funky number like that, you can easily go, come up here and click the percent format as percent sign right here, and you get percentages and you can combine text. So here's like a really simple way without any formulas or anything to combine text.

So you go equals and you put in quotations, you go any, and then you want to combine that. You go and. Text and you'll see is any text. So you can use the and sign. You can also put a space there or you can do space and that. But you might run into problems if you try to do use something other than an and sign.

You might want to try like a plus sign and you're gonna run into a problem. This is an error whenever you get hashtag value. And it says error. If you, if you ever get an error, you can always use a roll hover over the cell and you'll give you, it'll explain what it is. In this one, it says that function ad which is the plus sign parameter one expects number values.

you want a number here, but you had text. But any is a text. It literally says that any is a text and cannot be coerced to a number. So it's actually trying to think, is this a number? Let's see what happens when we use numbers. So this actually, when you use quotation marks numbers, it knows, oh, that's a number and it's gonna.

So it doesn't give you a error if you'd use an and see one and two become 12 because it's really just combining those things. So if you ever get an error, just hover over. You can, that'll be hashtag name. That's an error. It says just unknown. It's like, what is this? And now you've already been introduced to formulas.

They always start with equal sign and then you can do something like some, if you want to add. Say 45, 67, 76, 67 and parentheses, they'll always have the name of the formula or function. Actually Google calls 'em functions then parentheses, and then some amount of arguments. If you ever need help and you don't have this helper information, maybe it's closed.

You have this question mark. Next to it, it says, turn on formula help. You can click that and you have a little description of what that formula or function does. So what does that do? It actually sums up or adds up all of those numbers. I'm not gonna get into all of the functions now, but I will share with you some really fun ones that like average is a good one.

Why? Because what you can do in them, you can absolutely go 7,300. You can put the numbers here and you'll get an average. Great. But you can also refer to other cells, which means that you don't have to type the number inside of the equation or the formula. And you can actually do this with without formulas.

Let's do, let's do it without formulas First, let's go equals we do 90. Plus 1,530 gets a 1620. See, we didn't have to, this doesn't need any fancy formulas. We don't have to write in, add some, anything. It's just the plus sign. We can also do minus. We can also do times, and you have those two arguments or cells are now referred to in this cell.

But you can do the same with some. Let's get rid of that help. And you can do this range. So you can do that, or you can put a comma here. If it's only two, if it's like three G six, you can say, okay, that's the sum of all three. Or you can put a colon here and go G4 colon G six gives you everything. G4 and G six included everything in between, and you can sum those.

What's cool about this too is a, it's a relative. There's relative and there's absolute, it, it's a relative referral to the cell. So it means if I copy and paste this, it's actually going to change the the range. So see it's now G five to G seven, and this one is G four, G six. So as I'm copy and paste that down the line, it's going to change the formula because it's relative to what this is.

If you want. This is the biggest thing I'm gonna reveal right now. And I'm gonna get into this again in other videos cuz it's one of the coolest things in Google Sheets is if you want to hold this and you wanna say, okay, I want this sum, but I want to sum the same exact place. All you have to do is in front of the g whatever you want to do, hold you, put a dollar sign in front of so you can do dollar sign, G dollar sign, $4 sign, G dollar sign.

And now everywhere I copy and paste that it's absolute reference to the range. Isn't that cool? You can also choose which ones you wanna hold. If I wanna hold just the columns, like, gee, I can delete the dollar sign in front of the four and the six, and now if I move it up and down, it'll change. But if I move it left and right, it won't change.

Watch this. So that doesn't change. , but that doesn't change. That doesn't change the G. It only would change to four and the six, but it actually held the G, so this one's fine. So we can move that all around and see how it's changing up and down, but it's not changing left and right. That's really cool. So you get relative, normally if you just use a cell, you have relative, if you put the dollar sign there in front of the column, And or the row, then you're gonna have an absolute reference.

So that should be fun. This was an absolute basics and that should get you going. If you've never used Google Sheets before, go ahead grade a new Google sheet, sheet.new and enjoy Just. Messing around. Add some texts, try some formulas. What's one of the most fun things if you've never done it before?

Just type in equal and go through the alphabet and check out all the kinds of different things you could do. You co-signs and you, you, there's, I think there's something for every single letter of the alphabet. Yeah. Even Q J join Jay. Join is the only one. Oh. Join so much fun. Go ahead and enjoy. Now you can use Google Sheets in all of its glory.

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