Spit in the Face of God: Five Tasks You Didn’t Know Could be Done with Google Sheets

Google Sheets basically spits in the face of God. Man was never intended to have such power. You will surely burn in the Lake of Fire for using these tips to perform various tasks.

Anyway, it’s time to learn how to anger God.

Timestamp Cells with Ctrl+Semicolon

Typing the =TODAY() and/or =NOW() functions into cells is bullshit, since then you have to convert the output of that function into a hardcoded value, so that it won’t change over time.

Instead of doing that, hit Ctrl+; to add the current date into the currently-selected cell (ex: 2/12/2019). Or, if you like precise data, use Ctrl+Alt+Shift+; to get a timestamp with the current time included (ex: 2/12/2019 4:48:57).

Spreadsheet Tabs Can be Hidden

Right click a tab and select “Hide Sheet.”

To unhide tabs, go to View --> Hidden Sheets.

I bet you didn’t know about that, unless you did, in which case, please look up a video of Chris Rock saying “what do you want, a cookie?”

Quick Navigation with Magic

Holding Ctrl and pressing any of the arrow keys will jump the cursor to the next/last filled cell in the specified direction.

In most other applications, such as LibreOffice, Gedit, most browser contexts, and so on, using Ctrl+Arrow Keys also works to jump over full words when editing text of any type.

On a related note, Ctrl+D is the hotkey to “fill down.” Put a formula or a hardcoded value into a cell, highlight some cells underneath it, and press Ctrl+D to drag the formula. This is generally much faster than manually dragging formulas when working with many rows.

Google Translate is built into Google Sheets

For example, this input:

Will result in this output:

If you would like to further insult God (beyond speaking in the Unholy Spanish), there are various other tricks that can be done with this function, such as what is discussed in this forum thread, as well as similar tricks for the Filthy Money Changers.

Scrape Data from Any (Public) Webpage

Google Sheet’s IMPORTXML function is a quick and straightforward solution to scrape data from any webpage. Writing is hard; check out this video:

IMPORTXML uses XPath for data parsing. While writing and testing XPath queries, tools like XPather are useful.

Also see the IMPORTFEED, IMPORTHTML, IMPORTRANGE, and IMPORTDATA functions.

Bonus: Offbrand JavaScript

If you stayed up at night as a child, praying that God would heal your mother’s cancer, but He let her die anyway, your hatred for God might still be unsatiated. Custom functions can be written in Google’s custom scripting language known as the Google Apps Script scripting language, or more commonly as “Offbrand JavaScript.”

Apps Script is based on JavaScript 1.6, plus a few features from 1.7 and 1.8. Many basic JavaScript features are thus available in addition to the built-in and advanced Google services: you can use common objects like Array, Date,RegExp, and so forth, as well as the Math and Object global objects. However, because Apps Script code runs on Google's servers (not client-side, except for HTML-service pages), browser-based features like DOM manipulation or the Window API are not available.

Source: Google Apps Script Documentation: Basic JavaScript Features

The script editor can be accessed under Tools → Script Editor. In addition to custom XML parsing and handling, it can be used for basically any Crime Against God, such as scripts for custom capitalization of terms, spintax for content generation, checking HTTP status codes, sending bulk emails, creating scripts to import JSON (for example, so that you can scrape data from Reddit by adding .json to the end of any URL).

Honorable Mentions

• String parsing, replacing, matching, and extracting with regular expressions. [Regex101 Tool]
• Using Ctrl+Enter while editing a cell to create a line break within the same cell
• Using =CHAR(10) to create newlines when concatenating text, such as =”Line 1”&CHAR(10)&”LINE 2”
• Handling capitalization with LOWER, UPPER, and PROPER.
• Alternating colors are built in. Highlight a range and go to the Paint Bucket → Alternating Colors.
• Color-code tabs by right clicking a tab and selecting a fine color under the “Change Color” option.
• Pressing F2 while a cell is selected will move the cursor into the cell for editing.
• Notes exist (different from comments; simpler and less intrusive). Right click a cell and select “Add Note.”
• Creating single-cell charts with sparklines. [video]
• Creating reports from data using offbrand SQL queries.

In Conclusion

The wicked go down to the realm of the dead, all the nations that forget God.

Source: Psalm 9:17

Also, since all sins are equal in the eyes of God (James 2:10), you might also check out the Google Sheets, Google Docs, and Google Drive APIs.

Additional Resources

• The Full List of Google Sheets Functions
• The Official List of Keyboard Shotcuts for Google Sheets
• Learn Google Spreadsheets – A Quality Sinful YouTube Channel – Channel by Chicago Computer Classes by Chi Brander Inc.

Related Posts

• Get These Dependencies Off My Lawn: 5 Tasks You Didn't Know Could be Done with Pure HTML and CSS
• How to Make Graphs Using Google Sheets
• Using Excel to Create Scale-able Content for eCommerce and Other Related Tasks
• That Feel When Google Sheets Doesn’t Support Color Scales Based on Other Cells
• All Content Categorized under “Spreadsheets”

---