Use Google Search to lookup stuff in spreadsheets in Docs

I came across a nice post on Google Blog about functions in spreadsheets which uses Google’s search power to lookup stuff online. For instance you write the list of your favorite movies and use Google to insert the name of the director next to it. All this is done thanks to a spreadsheets function called Googlelookup. 🙂

The function is =GoogleLookup(entity,attribute) and it can look up and match-up things thanks to the Google search engine.

Google Lookup Fucntion

• If you see in the image above, once I used the function I could easily just enter the name of the book I liked and the authors were filled in automatically by GoogleLookup.
• If I changed the name of the book to the name of a movie and changed ‘Author’ to ‘Director’ then it will look up the director and so on.
• This is awesome for creating long lists and leaving the research to Google for getting the right value or answer. 😛

Google Docs has been consistently improving over the past few months with a new redesign and also some interesting products like Google Drawings which is great to brainstorm.

Google Docs spreadsheets cannot be compared to Microsfot Excel when it comes to complex functions but casual excel users can move over to Google Docs. I personally do not have MS Office installed on my computer and thanks to Google Docs do not miss it at all. Do you use Google Docs? Do drop in your comments.