Google Sheets, may be the Goldilocks of data sources for schools that aren’t quite ready to connect SchoolBI directly to a system. This spring we launched support for Google Sheets, which has been transformational for schools.

WHY IT MATTERS: In September 2021, Google reported that over 170 million students and educators worldwide were using Google Workspace for Education. With estimates of Google having 58% of the K12 institutions it is fair to say there are a bunch of people using Google Sheets for data storing and analysis. Because of the population of use and powerful capabilities inherent of a spreadsheet, we found the following reasons to support Google Sheets as a data source:

  • Schools will always have nuggets of data in spreadsheets that need to be included in their holistic data strategy. Google Sheets support allows data to be ingested directly into SchoolBI without requiring additional software or complicated configurations.
  • Evolution vs Revolution. Data maturity is a journey of continuous improvement and adoption of data best practices. By supporting Google Sheets, we’re helping schools ease into formal data management in an incremental way, while still giving you the benefits of advanced data strategies.


HOW IT WORKS: When building anything the old saying goes “simple is hard”. We never lose site of that when we design or build things for SchoolBI. Here is how SchoolBI connects to a Google Sheet as a source.

  1. Share your Google Sheet and paste a link to it
  2. Confirm the data to use
  3. Set the recurring refresh interval, and Go!

SchoolBI google sheets upload

schoolbi google sheets mapping

schoolbi google sheets sync

BOTTOM LINE: While we are pushing this industry forward with the desire to connect SchoolBI directly to data sources to increase efficiency and quality we know very well that supporting the ability to pull data from a spreadsheet has use cases. With this release, we are thrilled to help schools in their journey to becoming data-driven.

If you are interested in learning more about the release or how SchoolBI could help your school feel free to drop us an email info@schoolbi.com or reach out to us directly here.

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