Spreadsheet Automation 101: Variables

<div>0:00 In last video I showed you functions . And in this video I'm gonna go more into more details about variables. So again, we'll go over to our extensions app script and we wrote this entire new function here. 0:15 And let me just delete this and start over. So in our function that we write, we can write a variable and a variable allows us to basically simplify a lot of things. 0:30 Or it also lets us repeat things a lot. So we can do variable and v r is the what we use here. 0:37 We can also use C O N S T const.

You might see that if you are already copied and pasting code into your sheets and you see const cons and variable are very, very similar. 0:51 In fact, they're almost the same. There are a couple of differences, but we're not gonna go over that in this video. 0:56 But we have a function and we can have multiple variables. We can have, like, we can use the word one to equal one. 1:05 When we assign a variable, we use the equal sign.

The equal sign here does not mean EQ is equal two. 1:12 What I like to do is I like to think of it as the word is, it is assigning the word one with whatever we put behind here. 1:22 We can do variable two is or equal sign two. And then we can do some math in these functions , right? 1:30 So we can create a whole new variable, variable three, that is one plus two.

Now we've only been able to do this wording one plus two because we've assigned the variables one and two to one and two. 1:49 If we had perhaps done three or four here even though the word is one it is assigned the actual value of three. 2:00 And then just like we learned in the last video, we can return three. So let's actually look at that now in our spreadsheet . 2:09 So we gotta save. Now all we have to do is call my function . And how we do that is we do equals my function with the parenthesis and we get the number seven. 2:21 Why do we get that?

Is because we've reassigned three and four to one and two. If we do change three to one and four to two, save that we come back. 2:32 It is now three. So dysfunction has given us our A name to do and we can get something in return. 2:41 We can also use variables inside of the name of the function in these parentheses. That's what this parenthesis allows us to do with this. 2:48 This is sometimes called parameters .

I might be using that word a lot parameters when I refer to functional functions variables here in this particular case. 2:58 But These, these here that say var, those are variables. So these parameters could be one and comma two. So we can add more than one parameter here. 3:09 That can be defined by different thing. That can be different things. So we can change our variables one and two to one and two. 3:16 And actually we don't need any of these, these two lines. We can delete those two lines.

Now this variable three is equal to whatever is gonna be entered into our function on the sheet side plus the other one. 3:30 So let's see what that is. So let's save this and we might get an error , but we'll, before we get an error , we'll add two numbers. 3:37 We'll do one, two, and ideally we get three. But look at this, we can also do 11 and 22. And it's adding those two numbers together. 3:50 So this is a pretty simple math that we can do. We can also do very complicated math.

We can do something like the function CPM where we have a cost and views. 4:03 And we can say variable CPM is equal to, or is, sorry, not is equal to is cost divided by views view divided by 1000, right? 4:23 And we can return the cpm, we can hit save. And now we have to change this function , CPM 55, 45 and a bunch of numbers. 4:37 And we can see we get some CPM here, right? This is very, very powerful because now we can create functions that have completely custom parameters , completely custom variables. 4:51 We can return information, we can do math inside of these functions .

And now we're gonna be going into many, many more interesting things that we can do inside these functions .</div>