Google Sheets
1. Setup
To add a Google Sheets data source to the application, you first need to create a Service Account with Google. Service Accounts allow third-party applications to read data from your Google apps without needing to log-in each time. During Service Account setup you will be provided with a JSON key file. You need to upload this file to the application when setting up the data source.
2. How to create a Google Service Account?
Open the API Credentials Page. If prompted, select or create a project.
Click the “Create credentials” button. On the dropdown that appears, chose “Service account key”.
On the following page, use the dropdown to select the project you elected in step 1. For role select
Project > Viewerfrom the tree menu.Under key type, select JSON and hit “Create”
A .json file will then download to your computer. In the application under Settings, add a new data source for GoogleSpreadsheet. In the modal that appears, name this connection and upload the .json file you downloaded from the Google credentials console.
3. Querying
Once you have setup the data source, you can load spreadsheets into the application. To do so, you need to share the spreadsheet with the Service Account’s email address. This can be found in the Google Sheets API credentials page or in the JSON file under the "client_email" key. Sharing is done like you would share with any regular user.
After the spreadsheet is shared with your Service Account email address, create a new query in the application and select your Google Sheets data source. In the query editor text box, type your desired Spreadsheet ID. You can optionally select a specific tab of your spreadsheet by adding its tab position as a zero-indexed number separated by a vertical bar or pipe symbol.
For example:
to load the first sheet or
to load the second. That’s the whole query. Leave out any SQL at this point.
What is the Spreadsheet ID?
You can find your Spreadsheet ID in its URL. So if the spreadsheet URL is:
Then the ID will be:
This procedure might fail if your organization has restrictions on sharing spreadsheets with external accounts. To improve outcomes, be sure to create the Service Account with a Google account from the same organization.
4. Filtering The Data
When you connect a Google Sheet with the application, we load it in full. You can generate visualizations from the data and add it to your dashboards. If you want to filter some data or aggregate it beyond what a pivot table can accomplish, you can use one of the following methods:
Use the Query Results Data Source which allows you to query results from other queries.
Use Google BigQuery’s integration with Google Drive to create a Google BigQuery external table based on the Google Spreadsheet
5. A Note About Dates
The application uses Python-dateutil to parse dates from Google Spreadsheets. If you experience issues where the application parses the date incorrectly, try adjusting the date formatting in your sheet to ISO8601 or one of the formats shown here.
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