Google Sheets IMPORTRANGE: Looking up data with the VLOOKUP function

Note! This is part of a series on using IMPORTRANGE in Google Sheets. If you don’t know how to use IMPORTRANGE or what it is, I encourage you to head back to the first tutorial.

When I first sat down to write this tutorial, I had a specific opinion that one approach to using VLOOKUP on IMPORTRANGE data was better than another. However, I wanted to be certain. I ran some basic tests comparing the two approaches to see how they both perform over large data sets, and you know what? I was surprised to find I couldn’t find a discernable difference in performance.

Next, I reached out to some of the other fellow Google Sheets nerds, who like to go way too far with software for all the wrong reasons, and they seemed to feel that those demi-gods of Google devs really understand the wayward predilections of their users and may have benevolently stored the IMPORTRANGE data locally in the sheet you have imported to.

Will we ever know for certain? Only ever perhaps in the lay of the tea leaves or roll of the bones. We can but only guess the ways of the Googler as they traverse the digital world in all their etheral glory.

What does this mean in short? There are two pretty solid ways to use VLOOKUP with IMPORTRANGE. I’ll cover both in this tutorial.

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Google Sheets IMPORTRANGE: Prevent clever editors from accessing other ranges of your imported sheet

Note! This is part of a series on using IMPORTRANGE in Google Sheets. If you don’t know how to use IMPORTRANGE or what it is, I encourage you to head back to the first tutorial here:

Importing Range Data From One Google Sheet to Another

And here is a link to the sample data that I am importing if you want to play along:

Template – Project Tasks (IMPORTRANGE)

You’ve grabbed data from a source Google Sheet and used the IMPORTRANGE function to insert it into your destination sheet carefully selecting the range and sheet tab of the data that you want to display.

So you might be thinking, Great! I’ve managed to only display the content from my original Google Sheet that I want my users to see and hidden the rest from them. 

While this may be the case if you are only providing ‘View’ or ‘Comment’ permission to a Google Sheet, I do have an ugly little surprise for you if you.

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Are you sitting down? Are you comfortable? Do you have a support network nearby?

Let’s have a look at the IMPORTRANGE docs:

IMPORTRANGE editors can access other parts of the original Google Sheet - What to do
Click to Expand!

So basically, if you have other editors on your new sheet editing your document, they can access anything in the imported Google Sheet by copying the access granted IMPORTRANGE. All they need to do is change the Sheet tab and the range location.

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Importing Range Data From One Google Sheet to Another

One really amazing thing about Google Sheets is how easy it grab live data from one Google Sheet and import it into another. I’m not talking about a simple copy and paste job here. I am talking about real live data. Data that, when updated in the master sheet, will be reflected in the Google Sheet that you have imported the data to.

Everything starts with the IMPORTRANGE Google Sheets function.

But before we get started on the “How to’s,” you might be wondering why you might need to import live Google Sheet data from one sheet to another.

Or check out the table of contents to dive straight into what you need right now!

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How to create a time sequence in Google Sheets

Whether you are creating a Google Sheets data validation dropdown list of each minute in the day or want to create a daily progress log with 15-minute intervals, learning how to create a list of times in Google Sheets is a pretty solid skill to have.

However, knowing how to create a list of times in a single formula not only makes you a spreadsheets archmage 🧙‍♂️ but also allows you to do cool stuff like:

  • Automatically change your start and end times.
  • Changing your step increments from a minute to, say, every five minutes or an hour.
  • Make these changes quickly straight in your formula or another cell reference or even a formula rule in another cell.

So yeah… like I said… archmage skills.

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Sound cool? Of course it does, it spreadsheets! 🐐

In this tutorial, we will cover two approaches:

  1. A whole day list of times in 1-minute intervals
  2. Selected start and end times with selected intervals

Why can’t we do just one?

Well, there are two slightly different approaches to each. Geez! What’s with the questions?

Let’s get cracking!

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Calculate the Total Duration of Time between two periods in Google Sheets

Calculating the duration of time between two times is a pretty common task. From measuring how long a process took, to entering the hours you put into a project, to creating a timesheet. You will find it everywhere, so working out duration is a hand skill to have in Google Sheets.

However, there are some gotchas when calculating the duration of time. So it is worth a good looking into.

To get a feel of how calculating durations work out in the wild, you can check out the video below for a great example on how I use it to build a Project Task Google Sheets workbook.

Get your very own copy here: Project Task Manager.

In this tutorial, we will cover how to calculate the duration of time over a single day or multiple days and sum a list of durations.

I encourage you to follow along so you can create your own template copy of the Google Sheet and do a bit of practice and experimenting on your own.

Pretty much everything in this tutorial is beginner-friendly. Don’t be afraid to give it a go.

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