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How to Create a KPI Dashboard in Google Sheets with ChatGPT

Cody Schneider•

Building a powerful KPI dashboard can feel like a daunting task, especially if you’re not a spreadsheet wizard. The good news is you don’t have to be. By combining the flexibility of Google Sheets with the generative capabilities of ChatGPT, you can build a clean, functional dashboard to track your most important metrics. This article will show you exactly how to do it, step-by-step, by using ChatGPT as your personal formula-writing assistant.

Before You Build: Planning Your KPI Dashboard

Before you jump into formulas and charts, it’s essential to decide what you actually want to measure. A dashboard packed with dozens of metrics is often less useful than one with a few carefully chosen Key Performance Indicators (KPIs). The goal is clarity, not complexity.

Start by asking: What are the 3-5 numbers that give me the clearest picture of my business’s health right now?

Here are a few examples to get you thinking:

  • For an E-commerce Store: Monthly Revenue, Conversion Rate, Average Order Value (AOV), Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC).

  • For a SaaS Business: Monthly Recurring Revenue (MRR), Churn Rate, Customer Lifetime Value (LTV), Number of New Trials.

  • For a Marketing Team: Website Sessions, Leads Generated, Cost Per Lead (CPL), Email Click-Through Rate.

Once you have your core KPIs, identify where the data lives. Is it in Google Analytics? A Shopify CSV export? Your email marketing platform? Knowing this will prepare you for the first step: getting your raw data into one place.

Step 1: Get Your Data into Google Sheets

Your dashboard needs a foundation of clean, raw data. The best practice is to have two separate tabs in your Google Sheet: one for the raw data and one for the dashboard itself.

1. Create Your "Raw Data" Tab

Create a new tab and name it something simple like "Raw Data." This is where you will paste your exports from other platforms. For example, if you're tracking website performance, you might export a CSV from Google Analytics with data like Date, Source / Medium, Sessions, and Conversions.

Your raw data table should be simple and structured, like this:

A quick tip on data hygiene: Keep your column headers consistent every time you add new data. For example, always use "Revenue" instead of switching between "Revenue," "Sales," and "Total Sales." This consistency is crucial for your formulas to work reliably.

2. Create Your "Dashboard" Tab

Create a second tab and name it "Dashboard." This is where you’ll build your summary tables and charts. Leave it blank for now - we’ll populate it using formulas generated by ChatGPT.

Step 2: Use ChatGPT as Your Spreadsheet Co-Pilot

This is where the magic happens. Instead of trying to remember complex Google Sheets functions, you’ll just describe what you want to ChatGPT in plain English. It will act as a translator, turning your requests into precise formulas.

Creating a Summary Table with ChatGPT Prompts

Let's start by building a small summary table on our "Dashboard" tab that pulls from the "Raw Data" tab. Here’s a prompt you could use:

"I'm creating a KPI dashboard in Google Sheets. I have a tab named 'Raw Data' where column A is the Date, column C is Sessions, and column D is Conversions. In my 'Dashboard' tab, can you give me the formula to calculate the total sessions?"

ChatGPT will likely give you a simple formula like this:

=SUM('Raw Data'!C:C)

Now, let’s ask for something a little more advanced:

"Great. Now I need a formula to calculate the total sessions, but only from the last 7 days. Dates are in column A."

ChatGPT would generate a more complex formula, like:

=SUMIF('Raw Data'!A:A, ">=" & TODAY()-7, 'Raw Data'!C:C)

You don't need to understand every piece of this formula. You just need to copy it from ChatGPT and paste it into a cell on your "Dashboard" tab. You can repeat this process for each of your key metrics - total conversions, total revenue, etc. - to build out a clean summary panel.

Calculating Custom KPIs

ChatGPT is also excellent at creating formulas for calculated metrics. For example, to find your overall conversion rate, you don’t need to calculate it manually. Just ask:

"Using the same 'Raw Data' sheet, I want to calculate the overall Conversion Rate. Total conversions are the sum of column D and total sessions are the sum of column C. What’s the formula?"

It will provide the formula to paste directly into Google Sheets:

=SUM('Raw Data'!D:D) / SUM('Raw Data'!C:C)

After you paste this into a cell, remember to format the cell as a percentage by going to Format > Number > Percent in the Google Sheets menu.

Tips for Getting the Best Formulas from ChatGPT

  • Be Specific: Always mention the tab name (e.g., 'Raw Data') and the exact columns (e.g., 'Column C') in your prompt. The more specific you are, the more accurate the formula will be.

  • State Your Goal Clearly: Start with what you want to achieve, like "I want to calculate the average..." or "I need to sum the totals for..."

  • Mention Google Sheets: Sometimes formulas differ slightly between Excel and Google Sheets. Specifying your platform helps ChatGPT give you the correct syntax. Functions like QUERY or FILTER are more common in Google Sheets.

  • Refine and Iterate: If a formula returns an error, don't worry. Copy the error or describe what went wrong back to ChatGPT and ask it to fix the formula. For example: "That formula gave me a #DIV/0! error. I think it might be because some cells are empty. How can I fix it?"

Step 3: Building Your Dashboard Visuals

With your key numbers neatly calculated in a summary table, you can now bring them to life with charts and graphs. Visuals make it much easier to spot trends and understand performance at a glance.

First, use ChatGPT to help you organize the data needed for a chart. Let's create a daily sessions trend chart.

Ask ChatGPT:

"I want a table that summarizes the total sessions for each day from my 'Raw Data' tab. Can you give me a QUERY formula for that? Dates are in Column A, Sessions in Column C."

ChatGPT could provide a powerful formula like this:

=QUERY('Raw Data'!A:C, "SELECT A, SUM(C) WHERE A IS NOT NULL GROUP BY A LABEL A 'Date', SUM(C) 'Total Sessions'")

Pasting this into your sheet will generate a new table summarizing sessions by date. Now you can easily create a visual from it:

  1. Select the data table that the QUERY formula just created.

  2. Go to Insert > Chart from the Google Sheets menu.

  3. In the chart editor that appears, select "Line chart" under Chart Type.

You can repeat this process to create other useful visuals:

  • Bar Chart: Use a bar chart to compare performance across categories, like sessions by marketing channel.

  • Scorecard Chart: For your main KPIs (like Total Revenue), use the “Scorecard chart” option to display it as a large, standalone number.

  • Pie Chart: Use a pie chart to show the breakdown of a whole, like traffic share by country or device type.

The Reality Check: Maintaining Your Dashboard

You now have a functional, customized KPI dashboard. It's a fantastic tool, but it's important to understand its limitations. A dashboard built this way is not "live." Your charts and KPIs will only update when you manually add new data to your "Raw Data" tab.

This process usually looks like this:

  1. Log into Google Analytics (or any other data source).

  2. Set the date range and export the data as a CSV file.

  3. Open the CSV, copy the new data.

  4. Paste it into the bottom of your "Raw Data" tab in Google Sheets.

This manual routine works, but it can quickly become tedious, especially if you need to update your dashboard daily or weekly. It takes time you could be spending on analyzing the data and making decisions. It also introduces the risk of human error - pasting data into the wrong column or accidentally deleting a formula.

Furthermore, while ChatGPT is a brilliant formula generator, it can't analyze your data directly. It relies on your descriptions and the sanitized bits of information you provide. It isn’t connected to your live data sources, so its capacity for providing deeper, on-the-fly insights is limited.

Final Thoughts

Using ChatGPT as a co-pilot makes building a KPI dashboard in Google Sheets accessible to anyone, regardless of their spreadsheet expertise. By framing your needs in plain language, you can quickly generate the right formulas and build a clear, informative view of your business performance.

While this method is an excellent starting point, the repetitive cycle of exporting and pasting data can quickly eat into your valuable time. This is exactly why we built Graphed. We automate the entire process by connecting directly to your tools like Google Analytics, Shopify, and Facebook Ads. Instead of writing formulas, you can create real-time, self-updating dashboards by just describing what you want to see. This lets you trade manual data wrangling for instant, automated insights.