Hi Reader,

Welcome to the Google Sheets Tips newsletter #400, your Monday morning espresso, in spreadsheet form!

Well, this is it folks...

This is the final issue of the Google Sheets Tips newsletter.

(I will continue sending a weekly tech tutorial newsletter. Just that the format and the focus will be changing.)

So then. The end of an era. I think this is where I'm supposed to write something profound and wax lyrical about how life-changing it's all been, blah, blah, blah.

But I've always found that sort of writing difficult (like writing a condolence card).

There are a few things I want to say though:

Firstly, thank you for being a reader!

I hope you've found the content valuable and the weekly newsletter has added value to your week. I hope you've enjoyed reading the issues as much as I have writing them. I appreciate you sharing your ideas and opinions and have enjoyed conversing with thousands of you over the years.

For me, ending the Google Sheets tips series is a bittersweet moment. Of course, part of me is sad. Change is inevitable in life though and no matter how much we prepare for it, when it does arrive, it still seems to catch us off guard. Emotionally at least. But I'm ready and excited for the next chapter and writing about different topics.

I started sending these weekly newsletters on the advice of a business coach, who suggested it would help me connect with my audience on a regular basis. I didn't have a master plan, only a plan to share a valuable tip each week. It's grown from that simple premise into a readership of 45k folks and become the backbone of my whole business. I'm eternally grateful for that simple bit of advice.

Please don't go anywhere though! I hope you'll stick around to enjoy the new format newsletter, starting next week.

Today I want to celebrate 400 issues of this Google Sheets Tips newsletter, starting with how it all began...

History

📌 The first issue — about keyboard shortcuts — was sent on 30 April 2018 to 2,357 readers. That means I've been sending this newsletter for over 8 years. Yikes! (Huge shout-out to anyone who's been here since the beginning.)

📌 The newsletter began life as the "Monday Tips" newsletter, only becoming the "Google Sheets Tips" newsletter with issue 33 on January 7th, 2019.

📌 Readership grew steadily for years, from inception to the end of 2024, but has plateaued since then:

A simple IF and a complex SCAN formulas to number groups like 1,2,3,1,2,3,1,2,3,...

📌 Sheets Tip 241: A Chart Makeover 📊

Techniques for better charts in Google Sheets.

📌 Sheets Tip 238: Help your colleagues and clients with a Front Sheet

Shares strategies for making spreadsheets more user-friendly for clients.

Ben's Personal Favorites

Some of my personal favorites to write:

📌 Google Sheets Tip 75: A FACT to blow your mind ♣

Using the FACT function to explore that a shuffled deck of cards is unique, and using the CHAR function to create decks of cards in Sheets.

📌 Sheets Tip 184: CHICKEN and EGG finally solved! 🐣 (Tip #184)

Demonstrates a sorting technique inspired by the 'chicken and egg' problem.

📌 Is Formula Writing Dead? (And why we shouldn't mourn it) (Tip #377)

Essay on writing formulas with Gemini instead of manually.

Archive of all 400 tips

The archive of all 400 tips is available here.

And finally, here is your last Google Sheets tip:

➜ Sheets Tip #400: a simple way to create sparklines in Sheets

This is a question that has kept me up at night for the past few weeks: what should I share for my final Google Sheets Tip?

The obvious answer would be to share the top Google Sheets shortcuts, to mirror issue #1. Nice symmetry, but that was too easy.

Instead, though, I want to finish with something fun and whimsical.

Long-term readers will know that I've had a long fascination, some might even call it an obsession, with sparklines and trying to build crazy things in Google Sheets using sparklines

The sparkline formula is fairly complex to use, and recently a reader (thanks, Dad!) shared an alternative approach to creating simple sparklines in Sheets using the Datatype font.

The Datatype font turns text values into miniature charts.

It’s like a magic trick that turns data values in your Sheet into sparklines, but without the complexity of the sparkline formula.

How to use the Datatype font in Google Sheets

From the font selector in the toolbar, click “More fonts”, type in Datatype, and then select it:

Datatype converts text, called chart expressions, which are data values inside curly brackets {…}, into line, bar, or pie charts.

For example, this data in a cell:

{l:20,30,70,50}

is rendered as a mini line chart by the Datatype font.

In a Sheet, it looks like this:

There are three chart classes available, with specific limitations:

"l" denotes Line charts: up to 20 datapoints, each with a value between 0-100
"b" denotes Bar charts: up to 20 bars, each with a value between 0-100
"p" denotes Pie charts: a single value between 0-100

Example 1: Charts inside a sentence

Consider this sentence, which has little chunks of data (chart expressions) sprinkled in it:

Business closed out the year with $2 million in revenue {l:20,30,70,42}, an 18% share of the regional logistics-automation market {p:18}, and a headcount that had grown to 31 employees {b:11,19,15,31}.

Since Google Sheets allows multiple fonts within a single cell, highlight these chart expressions and change the font to Datatype.

The result looks like this:

Example 2: Mini Pie Charts

Any cells containing a single number between 0 and 100 can be used to draw pie charts with Datatype.

These are perfect for showing percentage values.

In this example, the formula converts a percentage value, which is a value between 0 and 1, into a value between 0 and 100, and adds the curly brackets and "p" to convert it into Datatype chart expression:

="{p:"&round(A1*100,0)&"}"

The output of this formula is text in our cell that looks like this:

{p:87}

We can then change the font type of this cell to Datatype and see it rendered as a pie chart:

How cool is that!!!!

(At least I thought it was! I went down a rabbit hole for an afternoon seeing what was possible with this font , which gave me all sorts of nostalgia for the pre-AI days when I used to experiment a lot with Google Sheets.)

Learn more about data type and see more examples on my website here:

Explorations with the Datatype Font in Google Sheets

Whether you've been a reader for 400 issues or just 4, thank you! 🙏

Have a great week.

Cheers,
Ben

P.S. Read this far? Here's a photo reward of a cool Bald Eagle that I saw when I was out on my bike last week: