How to Create a Weekly Report in Google Sheets
Building a weekly report shouldn't feel like a chore you dread every Monday morning. Having a clear, consistent view of your performance is vital, but getting there often involves tedious data exports and spreadsheet chaos. This guide will show you how to build a dynamic and automated weekly report right inside Google Sheets, saving you time and giving you the insights you need to make better decisions.
First Things First: Plan Your Weekly Report
Before you dive into formulas and charts, take five minutes to plan. A great report answers specific questions, so it's a good idea to know what those questions are first. A little planning upfront saves you from building a report that looks busy but doesn't actually tell you anything.
Identify Your Key Metrics (KPIs)
What are the 3-5 most important numbers that tell you if you had a good week? Don't track everything, track what matters. Your Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) depend entirely on your goals.
For a marketing team: You might track Website Sessions, New Leads, Conversion Rate, and Cost Per Lead.
For an e-commerce store: You’d likely focus on Total Revenue, Number of Orders, Average Order Value (AOV), and Top-Selling Products.
For a sales team: You'd probably look at New Deals Created, Demos Booked, Deals Closed, and Sales Pipeline Value.
Sketch a Simple Layout
Think about how you want to present the information. A common and highly effective structure includes three main components:
Summary (The "At-a-Glance" View): A small section at the top with your main KPIs for the week. Use big, bold numbers (or Scorecard charts) to make them stand out.
Trend Visualizations (The "How" View): Charts and graphs showing performance over time or broken down by category. This is where you see if numbers are going up or down.
Detailed Data Tables (The "Why" View): A compact table providing more context, like performance by marketing channel or sales by specific product.
Consider Your Audience
Who is this report for? Your CEO needs a high-level overview of business health, while your marketing manager needs a granular look at campaign performance. Tailor the metrics and level of detail to the person who will be reading it. A report built for a specific audience is ten times more useful than a generic data dump.
Step 1: Get Your Data Into Google Sheets
Now it's time to bring your data into an organized space. Your reporting is only as good as the data powering it. You have a few options, ranging from manual to fully automated.
Method 1: The Manual Copy-Paste (Good for a One-Off)
The simplest method is to log into your platforms (like Google Analytics, Shopify, Facebook Ads, etc.), export your data as a CSV file, and then import or paste it into a Google Sheet. To do this:
Export a CSV from your source platform for the desired date range.
In a new Google Sheet, go to File > Import > Upload and select your CSV.
Choose "Replace current sheet" or "Insert new sheet(s)" and click "Import data."
While quick, this is not a permanent solution for a weekly report. It’s manual, susceptible to copy-paste errors, and you have to repeat the process every single week. Use it for a one-time analysis, but for recurring reports, it's better to automate.
Method 2: Using Add-ons to Create Live Connections
The best way to handle weekly reporting is by creating a live, automated connection to your data sources. Google Sheets add-ons are perfect for this. They pull data automatically on a schedule you define, so your report is always up-to-date without you logging into a single other platform.
Google Analytics Official Add-on: If Google Analytics is your main source of truth, you can use the free official Add-on. Install it from the Google Workspace Marketplace, connect your GA account, configure which metrics and dimensions you want, and set it to run on a daily or weekly schedule.
Third-Party Connectors (like Supermetrics, Coefficient, etc.): For pulling data from platforms like Facebook Ads, HubSpot, Shopify, Salesforce, or others, a third-party connector is fantastic. These powerful tools let you connect all your marketing and sales platforms to Google Sheets and fully automate data pulls.
Step 2: Structure Your Data for Easy Reporting
A tidy spreadsheet is a happy spreadsheet. Instead of dumping everything into one tab, organize your report into separate sections. This makes it much easier to manage, update, and troubleshoot.
Create a 'Raw Data' Tab
Your automatically imported data should live in its own dedicated tabs. Don’t touch this data directly for your final report. Think of it as your single source of truth. If you connect to multiple sources, give each its own tab, like "RawData_GA" or "RawData_FB_Ads." This separation keeps things organized and prevents you from accidentally deleting or messing up your source data.
Build Your 'Dashboard' Tab
Next, create a new, blank tab. This is where you will build your actual report. You can name it "Weekly Dashboard," "Marketing Report," or whatever makes sense to you. On this tab, you will summarize, analyze, and visualize the information from your "Raw Data" tabs using formulas, tables, and charts.
This separation of data and presentation is a best practice. If your source data ever changes or has an error, you only need to update your formulas on the dashboard sheet, not rebuild the entire report from scratch.
Step 3: Analyze and Summarize Your Data
With clean, organized data, you can now start summarizing it into useful insights. Here are two of the most powerful tools in Google Sheets for this task: formulas and pivot tables.
Essential Formulas for Data Summaries
Formulas pull values from your raw data tab and consolidate them into a neat summary table on your dashboard.
SUMIFS: Adds up numbers that meet multiple criteria. It's perfect for calculating total revenue from a specific channel or from sales in a particular week.
This formula sums up column C (e.g., Revenue) when column A (e.g., Date) is within the last 7 days and column B (e.g., Channel) is "Google."
COUNTIFS: Counts the number of rows that meet multiple criteria. Use this to count leads, user sign-ups, or support tickets.
This formula counts how many rows have a date (column A) that falls between the dates listed in cells B1 (start date) and B2 (end date).
AVERAGEIFS: Calculates the average of a range based on specific conditions. Ideal for metrics like Average Order Value (AOV) or Average Session Duration by device.
Creating Summary Tables with Pivot Tables
If formulas aren't your first choice, pivot tables are a fast and powerful way to summarize thousands of rows of data without writing a single line of code. They are amazing for quickly grouping and summarizing data.
Let’s say you want to see weekly sales broken down by product. Here’s how:
Go to your 'Raw Data' tab and select all of your data (Pro-Tip: click a single cell and press Ctrl+A or Cmd+A).
Go to the menu and click Insert > Pivot table.
In the popup, choose to create it on an "Existing sheet" and select a clean area on your ‘Dashboard’ tab.
The Pivot table editor will open. Now, build your report:
Drag your Date field to the "Rows" section. Right-click on one of the dates in the pivot table, and select Create pivot date group > Year-week. This automatically groups daily data by week.
Drag your Product Name field to the "Rows" section as well, placing it under the date.
Drag your Revenue field to the "Values" section. Make sure it is summarized by "SUM."
Instantly, you have a perfectly formatted table showing sales totals for each product, aggregated by week. You can use this same process to analyze marketing channels, sales reps, customer segments, and more.
Step 4: Visualize Your Insights with Charts
Numbers and tables are great, but charts tell a story. Visualizing your data makes it instantly understandable and helps you spot trends that you might otherwise miss. Google Sheets has a robust chart-building tool baked right in.
Choosing the Right Chart for Your Data
Line Chart: The best choice for showing a trend over time. Use it to track daily website sessions for the week or sales totals day-by-day.
Column/Bar Chart: Perfect for comparing categories. Use it to compare a week's revenue across different marketing channels or see which products sold the most.
Pie Chart: Use this to show parts of a whole, like the percentage of website traffic from mobile vs. desktop. Keep it simple - pie charts become confusing with more than 3-4 categories.
Scorecard Chart: Used to display a single, important KPI. Create a scorecard for your headline numbers at the top of your report, like Total Weekly Revenue or New Leads.
How to Create a Chart in Google Sheets
Highlight the data range you want to visualize from your summary table (the one you built with formulas or from your pivot table). Do not create a chart from your raw data tab.
Go to the menu and click Insert > Chart.
Google Sheets will automatically suggest a chart type. You can change this and customize everything - colors, titles, labels, axes - in the Chart editor pane on the right.
Create a few key charts that display your main KPIs and arrange them logically on your dashboard tab to create a polished, easy-to-read report.
Step 5: Automate and Share Your Report
The final step is to make your report a living, breathing document that's easy to access and always current.
Automate Data Refreshes
If you used a data connector add-on in Step 1, you can schedule it to refresh automatically. Most add-ons let you set a refresh schedule, for example, "refresh data every day at 7 AM." A few clicks ensure your report is always running on the latest data, completely hands-free.
If your report runs on native Google Sheets formulas like IMPORTRANGE, the data will update automatically whenever the source sheet is changed.
Sharing Your Report Effectively
Once your report is ready, you need to get it in front of the right people. Use the "Share" button at the top right to control access.
Viewer access: This is best for stakeholders and company-wide sharing. People can see the report and its data but can't accidentally edit or break anything.
Commenter access: Ideal for collaborators who need to add notes or ask questions directly on the report without changing any values.
Editor access: Only grant this to people who also need to manage and build the report with you.
Final Thoughts
Building a weekly report in Google Sheets is a fantastic way to stay on top of your business performance without getting stuck in manual routines. By linking your data, using formulas or pivot tables to consolidate it, and creating clean charts, you can turn a basic spreadsheet into a powerful tool for making decisions.
While mastering Google Sheets is a great skill, we know that getting all your data connected and building these reports still takes time away from actual strategy. At Graphed, we created a way to skip the manual setup completely. Just connect data sources like Google Analytics, Shopify, and Facebook Ads, then ask in plain English for what you need - for example, “create a dashboard showing my week-over-week revenue by traffic source.” We instantly build a live, interactive dashboard that eliminates the spreadsheet work, letting you focus on taking action and growing your business.