How To Use IMPORTRANGE
The first step to making use of this powerful function is to have a spreadsheet that you want to
import data from into Google Sheets. Either locate one or, as I’ll do in this example, create a dummy
sheet with a few rows of data.
Here, we have a simple sheet of two columns and three rows. Our goal is to take this data and
import it into another spreadsheet that we’re using. Create a new sheet or go into an existing sheet
and let’s set it up.
You’ll begin with the same process as you would when using any function—click a blank cell so that
you can access the function bar. In it, type =IMPORTRANGE. This is the function keyword we can use
for importing sheet data.
The IMPORTRANGE function uses two parameters in its basic syntax: IMPORTRANGE(spreadsheet_url,
range_string). Let’s go over both.
spreadsheet_url is exactly what it sounds like—the URL of the spreadsheet that you’re attempting to
import a range of data from. You simply copy and paste the spreadsheet’s URL and here. Even easier,
you can optionally just use the spreadsheet’s identifier string, also found in the URL.
This identifier is the long string of text found between “spreadsheets/d/” and “/edit” in the sheet’s
URL. In this example, it’s “1bHbpbisrzaLF34r91UD1SLdDCpx7gD4v_4RnFBvgbfI”.
The range_string parameter is just as simple. Instead of printing all of the spreadsheet data from
another sheet, you can return a specific range. To import the data shown in the entire sheet of our
example, the range would be A1:B4.
This can be simplified to just A:B if we’re fine with importing all future data from these columns. If
we wanted to import the data without headers, that’d be A2:B4.
Let’s put together our full formula:
=IMPORTRANGE(“1bHbpbisrzaLF34r91UD1SLdDCpx7gD4v_4RnFBvgbfI”, “A:B”)