How to Create an Analytics Dashboard in Google Sheets with ChatGPT
Creating a fully functional analytics dashboard might seem like a job reserved for data scientists, but you can build a surprisingly powerful one right inside Google Sheets. Using ChatGPT as your on-demand data analyst, you can skip the complex formulas and tedious setup. This article will walk you through, step-by-step, how to organize your data, use ChatGPT to generate the right formulas, and visualize your key metrics.
Choose Google Sheets for Your Dashboard
Before jumping into the “how,” it’s helpful to understand why Google Sheets is such a great choice for your first dashboard. While not as feature-rich as specialized tools like Power BI or Tableau, it has some major advantages.
It's Free and Accessible: Almost everyone has a Google account. There’s no software to install and no subscription fee to worry about.
Built for Collaboration: Sharing your dashboard with your team is as simple as sending a link. Multiple people can view and edit in real-time, making it perfect for collaboration.
Familiar Interface: If you’ve ever used a spreadsheet, you’ll feel right at home. This familiarity removes the steep learning curve associated with dedicated business intelligence tools.
You get all the power of a custom tool without having to learn a complex new piece of software. It’s the perfect middle ground for moving beyond basic reporting without getting overwhelmed.
Get Your Data Dashboard-Ready
Any dashboard is only as good as the data powering it. Your first task is to centralize the raw numbers you want to track. ChatGPT can’t see what platforms you use, so you must first gather your data in a place where it (and you) can work with it.
1. Bring Your Key Metrics Into a Single Spreadsheet
Your performance data is likely scattered across several platforms. Think social media analytics, ad campaign reports from Facebook or Google, sales data from Shopify, or website traffic from Google Analytics. To get started, you have two primary options for getting it all into one place.
Manual CSV Export/Import: The quickest way is to log into each platform, navigate to its reporting section, and download your data as a CSV file. Then, in a new Google Sheet, go to File > Import and upload the file. While this is straightforward, remember that this creates a static snapshot of your data. To keep your dashboard current, you'll need to repeat this process regularly.
Automated Connectors: For a more hands-off approach, you can use third-party tools like Zapier or dedicated Google Sheets add-ons. You can set them up to automatically pull fresh data from your sources on a set schedule. This setup is more complex but saves a significant amount of manual work in the long run.
For this tutorial, we’ll focus on the manual method, but its tedious and time-consuming pitfalls will serve as valuable insight throughout this exercise.
2. Standardize Your Raw Data with ChatGPT’s Help
Once imported, your data is likely messy and inconsistent. You might have dates formatted as text, campaign names with typos, or currency shown in different formats. Before you can visualize anything, you need a clean, structured dataset.
This is where ChatGPT shines. Instead of looking up formatting functions, you can describe your cleanup goal and have ChatGPT offer a solution.
Your data needs to be in a flat, tabular format where each column represents a specific metric or dimension (e.g., ‘Date’, ‘Campaign Name’, ‘Spend’, ‘Impressions’) and each row represents a single record (e.g., performance for a single day).
Imagine your imported data looks messy. That confusing format with merged cells and inconsistent headers isn't useful for building charts. You can describe the mess in one line to ChatGPT and see what it recommends as a solution:
Your Prompt to ChatGPT: "I have data in Google Sheets. Column A has campaign names and dates mixed together, and Columns B-D have spend, clicks, and conversions in rows below the campaign names. How can I restructure this so each row is a consistent record with columns for Date, Campaign Name, Spend, Clicks, and Conversions?"
ChatGPT will likely suggest a combination of Google Sheets functions needed to parse and reorganize your table into a clean, query-ready format that’s perfectly structured for the dashboard we’re about to create.
Automate Your Analysis With ChatGPT Formulas
With an organized dataset, you can now build the analysis layer of your dashboard. This is where you transform raw data - like lists of daily ad spend - into meaningful insights, such as total spend for a given month or return on ad spend (ROAS) per campaign.
Track Your Key Performance Indicators (KPIs)
KPIs are the big-picture numbers you want to see immediately, usually displayed at the top of a dashboard. These are things like 'Total Revenue Last 30 Days,' 'Total Website Sessions,' or 'Overall Conversion Rate.'
Instead of manually highlighting numbers or fumbling with SUM functions, describe the KPI you want straight to ChatGPT.
Your Prompt to ChatGPT: "I have a Google Sheet where Column A contains dates, column D contains website sessions and column E contains sales revenue. I want to calculate the total revenue from the last 30 days. Please tell me the formula."
ChatGPT will instantly generate the correct formula, complete with a breakdown and explanation of how it works. Just copy the code and paste it directly into your spreadsheet.
=SUMIFS(E:E, A:A, ">="&TODAY()-30, A:A, "<="&TODAY())
Summarize Data using Formulas
Next, you’ll want a drill-down into more detailed trends found within the numbers. For dashboard-level detail, you no longer have to learn pivot tables, instead, ask ChatGPT for the equivalent using Google Sheets’ powerful QUERY function.
The QUERY function functions quite similarly to an old-school SQL server by letting you pull together massive amounts of data in your spreadsheet. It can be difficult to use, but ChatGPT takes all of the guesswork out of the equation.
Your Prompt to ChatGPT: "I'm working with a Google Sheet that has raw data in a tab named 'Ad Data'. It has the following columns: 'Campaign' (Column B), 'Spend' (Column G), and 'Conversions' (Column J). Please give me a single QUERY formula to create a summary table showing the total Spend and total Conversions, grouped by each Campaign. The header row is row 1 and the data source range is 'Ad Data'!A:J."
You don’t have to describe columns as numbers, you can tell ChatGPT exactly where the data is too. You can describe your working document in real-time and even create new data tabs. Without a blink of an eye, ChatGPT will produce exactly what you’re looking for:
=QUERY('Ad Data'!A1:J, "SELECT B, SUM(G), SUM(J) WHERE B IS NOT NULL GROUP BY B LABEL SUM(G) 'Total Spend', SUM(J) 'Total Conversions'")
Pasting this single formula into a new tab in your clean dashboard section can transform thousands of scattered rows into a digestible summary table without any cumbersome clicks or spreadsheet formatting required.
Visualize Your Performance Data
Now for the fun part: turning all that structured, organized information into visually appealing charts. Visuals can convey much faster than a table with numbers, making them a key driver of how effective your new dashboard is for communicating with you and your team.
1. Pick the Best Chart for Your Data
If you aren’t sure which type of chart to choose, don’t stress, you can use ChatGPT as your data visualization guru.
Your Prompt to ChatGPT: "I have a data table showing revenue per campaign for each week over the past quarter. I want to compare those campaigns against each other and see if they are growing against the total growth of our accounts. Should I use a line chart, a bar chart, or a stacked area chart?"
By describing both the datasets and your end-goals, ChatGPT can help steer you in the right direction with a full breakdown highlighting the pros and cons of using each visualization in your spreadsheet.
2. Create & Format Your Charts
With your key metrics and visualization type determined, you've only got one final step: to finalize its visual presentation. Your goal is to simplify things and use the colors, layout, and visual indicators to help support those reading your new dashboard in real-time as much as possible.
Arrange your KPIs prominently at the top, group thematically similar charts near one another, and stick to a consistent color scheme that you can use repeatedly as you create multiple charts.
By placing charts, KPIs, and summary tables on a separate tab in your Google Sheet, you now have a single destination everyone on the team can visit instead of asking, “How well did our campaigns perform last week?”
The Downsides of the ChatGPT and Google Sheets Method
For all its benefits, this is far from a foolproof system. There are a few key challenges keeping it from being a source of truth for your business’ data, and they can be serious blockers.
Still Far From "Real-time": The biggest challenge lies in the fact your dashboard stays one step behind. No matter how many integrations and connectors you’ve built, getting new data relies entirely on waiting to copy and paste new metrics into your sheet to create “real-time insights.”
ChatGPT Can't Verify Its Answers or Accuracy: It's great for writing formulas, but bad for seeing any sort of real-time insights from inside them. ChatGPT can’t see what’s inside, meaning whatever formula or chart it helps create cannot be read. You have to tell it everything, which requires knowledge and can expose lots of human error.
Time-Consuming: From exporting CSVs to checking for formula errors, there's always going to be some step you're forced back to rely upon human labor, or waste an afternoon when your formulas break. Instead of providing the value you want to provide and working towards bigger-picture thinking, you'll be trapped back in spreadsheet hell fixing a single problem.
Final Thoughts
Putting together your own Google Sheets dashboards and leveraging AI assistants like ChatGPT is an incredible way you and your team can get introduced to the larger concepts and techniques behind business analytics. With zero costs, you become ten times the formula master, giving quick insights you couldn't get easily. It turns you into a ten times better professional.
This pain in having to manually wrangle data export CSVs, just to use them to fix a spreadsheet and build your own dashboards, is exactly why Graphed was created! We're trying to create a fully automated reporting process for our customers that removes the guesswork from creating reports, allows them to have everything updated in real-time, and provides easy, no-nonsense dashboard creation tools they need to build faster.