Integrations
Connecting to Google Sheets
Find, read, create and update spreadsheets, including the trackers your team runs on.
Connect Google Sheets and Gini can find, read, create and update spreadsheets, including building one from scratch as the output of a job.
Separate from the rest of Google Workspace
Gmail, Google Calendar, Google Docs and Google Drive share one grant. Sheets does not, so connecting those does not cover it. If you want Gini working in your spreadsheets, connect this one too.
What it can do
- Find a spreadsheet by name, across your Drive.
- Read values, a range at a time or in batches.
- Look up a row and aggregate a column.
- Write values, update, append and clear.
- Add, delete and rename sheets inside a spreadsheet.
- Insert and delete rows and columns.
- Format cells, set filters and create charts.
How to connect
Open Integrations
app.ginicomputer.com → Integrations → Google Sheets.
Authorise with Google
The consent screen asks for Drive as well as Sheets, because finding a spreadsheet by name is a Drive operation.
Come back
Gini can now read and write your spreadsheets.
If Drive access is wider than you want, connect it to an account that holds only the sheets Gini should touch.
What changes anything
| Operation | What it does | Changes anything? |
|---|---|---|
| Search spreadsheets | Find a sheet by name | No |
| Get spreadsheet info and sheet names | See what is in a file | No |
| Get values, batch get | Read cells | No |
| Look up a row | Find a row by value | No |
| Aggregate a column | Sum, count, average | No |
| Create spreadsheet | Make a new file | Yes |
| Update or append values | Write cells | Yes |
| Clear values | Empty cells | Yes |
| Add or delete a sheet | Change the file's tabs | Yes |
| Insert or delete rows and columns | Change structure | Yes |
| Format cells, set filters, create a chart | Change presentation | Yes |
What it's great for
- A spreadsheet as the output. This is the one people do not expect. Ask for analysis over a few hundred rows of anything and getting it back as a sheet, rather than as a wall of text in Slack, is usually what you actually wanted.
- Keeping a tracker current. "Add this week's numbers to the growth tracker."
- Reconciling. "Compare this sheet against Stripe and tell me what does not match."
- Reading a model you did not build. "What is in the pricing model, and what changed since I last looked?"
Example routine
A weekly metrics tracker that fills itself in:
- Every Monday, pull the week's figures from the source of truth.
- Append a row to the tracker, in the existing format.
- If any figure moved more than 20%, say so in the channel with the number.
Good to know
- Google's version history is the undo. That makes a spreadsheet comparatively safe to let Gini edit, and it is the reason this connection is a good first write-enabled one.
- Say "add a new tab, don't overwrite" on a sheet that matters. Gini follows it, and it removes the only genuinely annoying failure mode here.
- A sheet that looks like a document is harder. Merged cells, headers three rows down, notes in the margin. Gini handles a fair amount of it, but the further a sheet is from a plain table the more it has to guess.
- Name the sheet, or say where it lives. Two files with the same name is common and Gini cannot tell which you meant.
Troubleshooting
Gini can't find the spreadsheet
Check the name, and that the connected Google account can open it. A file shared with a group you are not in is invisible to Gini too.
It wrote to the wrong tab
Name the tab. "Add it to the tracker" leaves the tab to inference when a file has several.
The numbers came back as text
A column formatted as text will read as text. Ask Gini to say what it saw, then fix the formatting in the sheet.