How to Reference Another File on Google Sheets

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How to Reference Another File on Google Sheets – Guide

When it comes to analyzing data at work, we often need to get information from many different sources to get the big picture. However, when you need to manage product inventory or report quarterly sales, time-consuming switching between spreadsheets or manually copying and pasting data in one place can be time-consuming. There is a better option. You need two pieces of information from the original table to move the data: the table URL and the range of cells you want to get the data from. In this example, the name of our original table is Sales.

First highlight and copy the full URL from the original table. Now let’s use the IMPORTRANGE function. First, click on the new table you want to add data to. In this example, it is called “Product Inventory”. Insert columns or rows into the table where you want to insert data. The first time you import data from this particular table, you may see a pop-up. Do not worry! This security check ensures that you can give anyone working on this table access to data that is in another table. You will be asked to “Allow access” when you see the #REF in your cell. Go ahead and click Yes.

How to Extract cell data from another spreadsheet

The most common reason people want to pull data from another sheet in Google Sheets is when those other tables are lookup tables. For example, one sheet might contain all the products you sell along with their UPC codes and unit prices, while another sheet might contain a record of your sales. To calculate the total sale, you will need to obtain pricing data from the product spreadsheet. See how:

In the original spreadsheet where you want to insert data, place the cursor in the cell where you want the data to be placed.

Type = (the equal sign) into the cell. Select the second sheet and then the cell that contains the data you want to bring into the original sheet.

Press Enter to finish. This will bring the data from the cell you selected to the first worksheet.

Extract cell data from a different spreadsheet file

You can also reference data from a different spreadsheet file with the IMPORTRANGE formula.

Before using the IMPORTRANGE formula, you’ll need the URL link to the Google Sheets file where you want to reference the data. Highlight and copy the URL link into final of the long code before the last slash (/) in the URL.

In the original spreadsheet where you want to extract the data, place the cursor in the destination cell and type: = IMPORTRANGE (“URL”

Be sure to replace URL in this formula with the URL you want to reference.

Follow the quotes after the URL with a comma (,) and enter the name of the worksheet and cell from which you want to get the data. In this example, you would type: = IMPORTRANGE (“URL”, ”Sheet1! C2 ″). Again, the URL would be a full URL. We’re just keeping it short for example purposes.

Press Enter. You will see that data from the other Sheets spreadsheet file is inserted into this spreadsheet.

Final note

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