Learn Google Sheet Formulas The Hard Way

About this Tutorial

One weird way to learn more about what Google Sheets can do. https://bettersheets.co/formulas

Video Transcript

0:00 <affirmative>. Hey, so I understand that Google Sheets is pretty darn hard. It's starting from a blank slate every single time.
0:09 It's literally white and black and it's just staring at you in the face with nothing. No, no, nothing, no sense of soul behind those eyes.
0:19 Well, here's something that I wanna share with you that I don't think many people will do. So that's why I called this Learn Google Formulas.
0:30 The hard way, at least Google Sheets formulas. We should probably fix that. Google Sheets formulas. All right, this is why I called it Google Sheets formulas.
0:39 The hard way is that I don't think many people will do it. I don't think you'll necessarily do this, or you might start and you'll stop.
0:47 But I'm gonna give you, at the end of this video a trick or a hack a tool. Let's say that I've created a better sheets to help you, so don't worry.
0:58 What I'm about to show you is so stupidly simple as well, that you might not do it and you might not think you'll get enough out of it.
1:06 But I can tell you unequivocally, this is very much how I learned a lot of Google Sheet formulas is you can go into any sheet.
1:15 We just started a new sheet sheet.new, and I type in any cell. Are you an A one or are you a B two?
1:23 I'm a B two myself. Starter here. Just type the equal sign. And once you type the equal sign and then you do any letter, you can do A, you can do B, you can do C, D, E, F, all the way up to z <laugh>, I think Y as well, and X.
1:40 Yeah, I think there's one for every, there's a formula for every letter, at least one or two.  It's a Q.
1:45 Yeah, they're definitely q u. There's definitely for every 20, for all 26 letters, there is a formula. Now, why is this important?
1:54 Why would you start at a or why would you start it Maybe Doo Z down to a check out the list, see what they are, and click on them.
2:02 And if you click on them and you click on details, you can read a little short description about it. You can see what you need to, what syntax it is right here.
2:13 What is the kind of variables it does? What is it? Return? You can also click here to learn more. For some reason, Michael Cogen gives me an error every time I do this.
2:24 It gives you general usage. It's some examples, and then asks you if this was helpful or not. Now, here's the thing.
2:31 Google has been very good by providing this information. We can open a new window. Actually Google Docs editor help, but it's very difficult to really understand how this is used, like the z test.
2:49 And we can go through each and every one. I can, I have to reload this sheet every time. Go back to B two equals A.
2:57 And there's something like abs. Let's, well, let's let it load up. It takes a moment here. Abs there absolute number of absolute value of a number.
3:08 Now why would you wanna like, look through all these? Well, there's like two ways that we learn at least two binary ways.
3:17 I, and I know there's ways to learn by listening. There's ways to, by to learn, by seeing you experiential. There's diff that's one type of way types, buckets of learning.
3:28 But I think there's fundamentally two ways to learn thi something, especially Google Sheets and Google Sheets formulas and getting better.
3:35 There's two ways. One top down where you have some ultimate goal and you just need to get through it, and you need to know, how do I do the thing that I'm doing?
3:44 And then the other way is bottom up understanding what is capable, what Google Sheets is capable of. Now, it is a much slower, it is a much less certain way of learning, right?
4:00 If you just go for the thing you're trying to do and know, okay, probably 99% of the time, if I'm trying to do something, someone else in the last 15 years has tried to do this in Google Sheets.
4:12 So I'll just search for that. I'll Google for that. You can also learn, and, and that's great. You'll learn that way.
4:19 And, and, and that's many <laugh> of the ways to learn in better sheets. A lot of them, my videos are just a tutorial showing you how to do something, and then you end up learning some cool little formulas on the way.
4:29 But here, I'm trying to tell you, there is this crazy other way, which is you can read every one of these formulas.
4:37 Do you know how many there are? There's 502. I know that because here comes the trick, here comes the tool.
4:45 If you truly go to a sheet and start doing equals great <laugh>, but also you might be a great candidate for joining Better Sheets.
4:55 And if you're already a, a member, member of Better Sheets, then you'll know that if you go to Better sheets.co, let's just go to Better sheets.co.
5:07 Up at the top is a link for formulas. It is open and available to everyone, member or not member. So if you're not a member watching this, go ahead to Better sheets.co/formulas.
5:18 And here are 500, actually 501. Google Sheets formula is everything from ABS to Z test and everything in between. We have, if let's find, if here I have it a couple times.
5:33 There's a few ifs. There's, if, here's the biggest point, I don't know where to move my face. This is the biggest point though.
5:42 It has very similar information as Google, but it also has links to any and all better sheet videos that feature that formula.
5:52 So here we have 20 Better Sheet formulas better Sheets tutorials That include the formula of if, if is literally one of my favorite and most popular formulas.
6:06 I love it. It it's very useful in many, many use cases. You can also see these formulas if you go over to the tutorials tab.
6:13 But I wanted to show you this formulas up here tutorials, and you can filter all the tutorials by whatever f formula you're looking for.
6:22 But this way you can go and discover 501 formulas over at Better sheets.co/formulas. So there'll be a link in the description here for you, or just go better sheets.co/formulas or just go to better sheets.co and click on formulas.
6:37 And here's every single formula. It's really fun. I'm gonna be adding more information as we go Right now. We have a link to Google Docs.
6:44 We have links to any and all sheet videos that Better Sheets features.  Some are free, some are paid. You'll, if you are not a member, you'll see a lock on the videos if you are a member.
6:59 And you can track which videos you're watching. So if you have already watched the video, it'll have a check mark.
7:04 Mark. If you haven't watched the video, it, it'll have a number. Then you can go to the video, watch it.
7:09 Oops. So you can go to a video and you can see, watch the video, and then you can click Mark is completed.
7:14 So, you know, you watch that video. And so you can watch, re-watch video in different lenses in different context if you're looking for more information about that formula.
7:23 Again, all of the, all the videos that are listed here are not gonna feature, like, they're not going to teach you how to use the formula.
7:31 They're just gonna show you how to use the formula in that video. The form, the vi <laugh>, sorry, the formula will appear at some point in that video.
7:42 So, just a caveat, I hope you enjoy this, and I do think that there is a great opportunity to learn a lot about Google Sheet formulas by just going through A, B, C, D.
7:55 But I try to make this easier for you and learn a lot of different ones, and you'll be able to learn the most common ones that we use in videos.
8:02 Sometimes there won't be any videos in better sheets for some of these, like the, the very weird and esoteric ones that nobody uses or very few people use.
8:11 But we'll be adding more and more videos, go on better sheets all the time. So keep become a member, stay notified of videos coming out.
8:20 And I hope you can learn Google Sheets an easy way or by working on the projects you wanna work on.
8:26 Or go ahead, learn Google Sheet formulas the hard way by just going through and reading all of them. There's some pretty interesting ones that I was like, whoa, that exists.
8:36 You can do that. You can do that in Google Sheets. So enjoy. Bye.