 Welcome to Google Sheets. What I want to tell you is that data loves spreadsheets and that really you could learn to love them too. Now, you may not think of yourself as a data kind of person, but the important thing to know about data is no matter what you do, data gives you a map. It helps you find your way. And you may wonder, a map to what? Well, that depends on what your goals are. They might be professional, organizational, social, personal, political, but whatever it is you're interested in, data can help you do it better. For instance, if you have a business, it can help you figure out what work that you do is most popular with paying clients. It can help you figure out what brings people back to your nonprofit organization. It can help you say what attracts new people to your political organization. It may help you figure out what's the best use of time in your own personal life. And it can even help you figure out important questions like how much should you charge for your work or your services. So data is a method of approaching any one of these questions. But what does that have to do with Google Sheets? Well, Google Sheets lets you do several different things that are really important with data. First and foremost, Google Sheets gives your data a home. Now you know where your stuff is and you can find it, you can search for it, you can share it with other people. You get it centralized, and now you can do something useful with it. And you know, then what what are those things that you're going to do? Well, there's a few things that you can do with Google Sheets that are really helpful. Number one is you can graph your data, you can explore your data, think of yourself as an explorer, you're out there in really a new area and you're trying to find out what's all around you and what's the best way forward. In Google Sheets, you can do that with graphs like this multiple variable timeline, it can help you find the places of greatest value and help lead you in that particular direction. Google Sheets can also help you sort and filter through your data. Now, you got a collection of teabags, put them in little boxes, it makes it easier to see what you have and also to see what you're missing. In the data world, you can sort your data by whatever categories you want, you can filter it here, I'm filtering by a couple of different categories. If you've got a business, you can find new clients that are in your database and focus on them, or you can find open accounts and you can focus on them and take care of it. And once you find the data that's most important to you, you can calculate things about that data, and you can summarize it really, it's a way of bringing things in to focus. The entire point of data analysis is to simplify things in a way that helps you reach practical goals. You want to bring it into focus. Sometimes the focus analogy really can be pretty literal. Here I have a set of almost 1400 numbers and it's completely overwhelming. But over here on the right, you can see that the mean, the average is 547.5. The maximum is 999. I've got conditional formatting that highlights where those 999s are. And also where the minimum values of 100 are. It helps you sort through the haystack and find the needles are going to be of most use to you. Finally, believe it or not, spreadsheets and Google Sheets can help you work creatively. Now, not necessarily to create your own art, but if you're an artist, you will find out that Google Sheets can help you free up some time and some cognitive bandwidth to focus on the things that are most important to you. And you can be creative in spreadsheets. Here's one that I use when planning a big trip around the world with my family, I actually had to get a spreadsheet to help figure out who was going to sit where on all of the plane rides. Or you can use a spreadsheet to help you make a decision about what you want to focus on in your business to help you reach both your personal and professional goals. I'll give you examples of all of these things. And as you go through the course, you can follow along by downloading the files that we have at this address, datalab.cc slash tools slash GSH that stands for Google Sheets 01. So that's datalab.cc slash tools slash GSH 01. Download the sheets follow along and really try Google Sheets. And what you'll find is that it's going to help you listen to your data and find your way in your own work. Thanks for joining me. I'm excited to have you here. And I'm excited to hear from you about how working with data in a simple tool like Google Sheets can help you find better value in your own work.