Build Apps and Dashboards with Gemini in Google Sheets 📊

But now it's going a step further by adding the Canvas feature, which means it can effectively build interactive apps or dashboards right inside the spreadsheet that use the same data that sits in your spreadsheet already.

And you don't really need to do anything other than ask Gemini to create it.

Let me show you an example then.

This is a spreadsheet with just some simple employee data.

There's one row per employee.

It's got all the data you can see on here.

And it might be nice if I'm sharing this with the rest of my team.

We want to make edits to make it a bit more visual than just using a spreadsheet.

It could help us speed up the process, or it might just make things simpler.

For someone who's maybe a bit scared of spreadsheets, what I'm going to do is click on the Gemini icon on the top right of the screen.

That's going to open up the Gemini side panel.

And you might get one of these kind of shortcut buttons to allow you to go straight to Canvas or do something specific.

But I'm going to click on the Tools button within the chat box at the bottom here.

Click on Tools, then choose Create Canvas.

And you see, now it's got the Canvas option selected at the bottom here.

And I could write a prompt of my own.

I could really, in detail describe the dashboard or app that I want.

I could have even got Gemini separately to help me write a detailed prompt like that.

But for the sake of this, I want to show you what's possible if you just do a simple prompt.

There's a few here.

One is Create a Dashboard.

One says Create a gallery view, One says Create a Kanban board.

That's where you can drag and drop things from different from, say, to do to done.

I'm just going to click Create a Dashboard and Gemini gets straight to work.

now this is quite slow.

It's not particularly quick.

It will likely take a few minutes.

And the more data you've got, the longer this is going to take as well.

So I did this earlier.

Let me show you the example.

Exactly the same data in the sheet here, but now I've got this new tab that says Directory Dashboard and it's created this Dashboard.

You see, it's got like a much nicer view.

I've got a button where I can click to add a contact that pops up a form.

So it means that I have to click through like tab across to the next cell and the spreadsheet and so on, and then I can create it.

And because this is linked in this spreadsheet, it would literally just add a row of that data that I put in here to the spreadsheet.

But it also gives me this overview of all of the data in here.

How many are, active versus off boarded, the companies, the start dates.

And then I've got a much nicer looking table here as well where I could still filter.

This is a bit more like a spreadsheet, but because it's built in search here.

If I search for Smith, you see, as I type it, it filters it.

This is kind of mind blowing I think, and a bit of a game changer for anyone working with data in any kind of capacity in a company.

And often I find that people that are given spreadsheets to work with are either not the ones that made it so they don't necessarily know how all the formulas and so on are working, or they might just be kind of doing buy with a spreadsheet because that's what they've always used.

And actually this could give them something much easier to work with, which could save tons of time when it comes to inputting or analyzing data.

hope that's helpful.

If you've got any questions about it, you can leave them in the comments on the web.

I'll see you in the next one.