GoogleLookup: do things you never thought possible with spreadsheets

returns the value 1,449,634, which is in fact accurate. This may sound like magic, but go ahead and try it in a spreadsheet of your own. Now try swapping out “Philadelphia” for other city names: New York, Boston, San Francisco, Bangkok, London…

Radical, no? Perhaps you are saying to yourself, “this seemingly magical feature is indeed rad, but what real world scenario would actually warrant use of this function? How can GoogleLookup help me?” Let’s look at one example.

My good friend Caroline recently asked me and Dan to recommend some awesome dance songs for her upcoming wedding. Needless to say, Dan and I had lots of suggestions. Rather than rattle them off while she took notes on a scrap of paper, I told Caroline that I would send her a spreadsheet. When I got home, I opened a new spreadsheet and typed out 26 dancable song titles. But I wanted to give Caroline a little more information — I wanted to include the artist of each song. I didn’t know the artists for some of the songs on the list (especially for some of the more questionable tracks, all suggested by Dan) but I could have looked each one up and then typed out the artists name. This might have taken 20 minutes. Instead, I used GoogleLookup to automate that process.

Take a look at the spreadsheet. In cell B2 (under “artist”) I typed =GoogleLookup($A2, “artist”). (ignore the $ symbol; it just means that I want the function to use column A even if I copy the formula into another column). I then copied this function into all of the cells in column B (just drag the lower right-hand corner and drop). Within moments, all of those cells were populated with likely values for the attribute “artist” given the entity in column A, the song title.

Now, as you will observe, the values are not perfect. Gloria Trevi is NOT the artist I had in mind when I suggested the classic rock tune, “Gloria.” And while UB40 did do a version of “Can’t Help Falling in Love With You,” I would urge Caroline to stick with the Elvis original. But there were also a lot of accurate values. And one cool subfeature of GoogleLookup is that clicking into the cell will trigger a pop-up citing the source (url) of the value and offering a “more options…” link.

You can easily change the displayed value by selecting one of these alternatives.

As you can see on my Good Dance Songs spreadsheet, I used GoogleLookup to populate two more columns: album and year, both of which will be helpful to Caroline and her DJ (the functions, respectively: =GoogleLookup($A2, “album”), =GoogleLookup($A2, “year”)).