Linking Google Spreadsheets Dynamically

How to link Spreadsheets

Few people have asked me how to link spreadsheets. Say someone has a spreadsheet you take data from. They update their sheet and you have to then update your one. You can link the two dynamically using the importrange function.

So for example:

=ImportRange("0AkvcQ-UNCMvIdDF5ZDhOYVlXb0drcW1zNTMyRjNvVkE","sheet1!A5")

The first bit in quotes is the "id" of the source spreadsheet. You can copy and paste this from the spreadsheets url. The second bit in quotes is the name of the sheet in the spreadsheet you want to take data from and the data you want.

So sheetname followed by ! then the cell or cell range e.g A1 or A1:A100 - all in quotes as the example above.

This will pull in data from the source sheet. Change stuff on the source sheet and this will update.

If you are doing this more than once in a sheet it is a good idea to put the sheet id in a cell - say A1. The the formula becomes:

=ImportRange(A1,"sheet1!A5")

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