I’ve been poking through some of the Tiller videos on YouTube and found a couple good tips. Are there any out there that are a tutorial for building a new sheet? I have a few ideas for making my own sheets (or my own versions of some of the sheets already out there) but I don’t feel like I have quite enough knowledge in Sheets of how to build the formulas, and deciphering the existing ones is sometimes tricky.
It would be really helpful to see a walkthrough of someone building something like the Category Tracker sheet - explaining how they set up the input fields, how they use the hidden fields, and how the formulas are written to generate the data shown. I’ve read through the Template Builder’s Reference and that’s useful in understanding the concepts about how Tiller is built, but I’m looking for something more like “programmer training” that would walk through the mechanics of actually creating a new sheet.
Is something like that already out there that I haven’t run across yet?
It is useful, but it’s more of a design guide than a tutorial. So while it mentions to use ARRAYFORMULA() and in-sheet formulas, I’m interested in how do you build/decipher this:
=iferror(QUERY(Transactions!A:AG,"SELECT " &I1& " , SUM(" &I3 & ") WHERE " &I4& " >= DATE """ & text(E4, "yyyy-mm-dd") & """ AND " &I4& " <= DATE """ & text(E5, "yyyy-mm-dd") & """ AND " &I2& " = '" & E3 & "' GROUP BY " &I1& " ORDER BY " &I1& " ASC LABEL SUM(" &I3 & ") '', " &I1& " ''", -1),"")
Walking through how you build up formulas like these would be easier than reverse engineering it (especially for those of us with limited Google Sheets/advanced spreadsheet experience).
Yea, it can be challenging when you get to Arrayformulas, Queries, Filters, etc. I’m still learning, but have improved a lot over the past year. For me, I usually Google around looking for a formula that does at least part of what I want to do so I’m not starting from scratch. For formulas with lots of nesting, I usually copy the formula into Notepad, and then indent the different commands to better understand what’s nested within what. You can actually paste them back into Google Sheets this way and continue to see the nesting.
For me, I need to learn by doing, so I just keep trying to come up with ideas of what I’d like to see Tiller do, then start with the most basic part of it, and keep expanding and improving. Lots of trial and error. I often see tutorials when Googling around, but they are typically for one command, and are for a use case that is much different than what I’m trying to do.
Also, I’ve found that the built-in help in Google Sheets has often been helpful:
