Work with Your Data

Many of us use google sheets on a daily basis. You can get by with a few functions and create a report that summarizes your data set in a nice and clear way. The two most popular functions that help with it are Sumif and Vlookup. In addition, you can create a Pivot table which is quite useful as well.

However, there is another powerful function to add in your arsenal – a Query function. It allows you to send requests to your data by utilizing an SQL-like syntax.

1. Type =Query () in your google spreadsheet.
2. In the brackets, first select a data set located on any of the tabs.
3. Then, within quotation marks, specify which columns to select by using an SQL-like query and a key word SELECT (just like in the example above).

Let’s say the data is stored in a range D2:F14 on a current tab. An example data set has Region, Country and Population. Then type the following to select all the countries located in Asia & Pacific region and their population.

=QUERY(D2:F14,"SELECT E, F WHERE D = 'Asia & Pacific'")

This will result in a list of countries as follows: 

To take it one step further and calculate the total population of all the countries that belong to an Asia & Pacific region, type the following:

=QUERY(D2:F14,"SELECT D, sum(F) WHERE D = 'Asia & Pacific' group by D")

The result will show:

To play with the data and create your own query, click here and make a copy of the sheet.

To learn more about Query function refer to this google doc. The source data for this example is taken from here: country by region, population by country.