How to connect Google Sheets with Excel

Both Google Sheets and Microsoft Excel are powerful spreadsheet software. While in Excel you can work offline, Google Sheets lets you create and manage spreadsheets online. Google Sheets also saves every single change automatically. The benefit of using Google Sheets is that you can manage spreadsheets from anywhere on any device simply by signing into your Google account.

You can download Google Sheets in xlsx and other formats and create a backup on your PC. But every time you make a change to the Google Sheets, you have to download it and replace the previous backup file. Now, imagine if you at a higher post in an organization, you have to manage a significant amount of data. In such a condition, it will become hectic for you to keep all the backup files in synchronization with Google Sheets manually. Is there any method by which all the downloaded files will be updated automatically? Yes, there is. In this article, we will see the method of connecting or synchronizing Google Sheets with MS Excel so that every change made in Google Sheets will be reflected automatically in the respective MS Excel file.

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How to connect Google Sheets with Excel

1] Open the file in Google Sheets which you want to synchronize with MS Excel. I have prepared sample data of temperatures of different states of India.

2] Now go to “File > Publish to the web” in Google Sheets.

3] In the “Entire Document” drop-down menu, you have an option to publish either the entire document or only the particular sheet of the document.

Click “Published content & settings” part to expand it and see whether the “Automatically republish when the changes are made” part is enabled or not. If not, enable it. Now click on the “Publish” button and select OK in the popup.

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4] After publishing the document, you will get a link. You have to paste this link in the MS Excel document which you want to connect with Google Sheets. If you paste this link in your web browser, you will see that it is available as a web page.

Now, launch MS Excel and create a new blank document in it. Go to “Data > New Query > From Other Sources > From Web.”

5] You will get a popup window, where you have to paste the copied link and click OK. If you get here two options, Basic and Advanced, select Basic.

6] The entire Google Sheet data will be available in Excel in the form of a table. Now, in the “Navigator” window, first, click “Select multiple items” check box and then select “Table 0.” A preview of the selected item is available on the right panel.

You can see in the below screenshot that column 1 is empty and column 2 lists serial numbers, and our actual data is listed in columns 3 and 4. Because we do not need columns 1 and 2, we have to delete them. For this, click on the “Edit” button at the bottom of the Navigator window. Some of you may have “Transform Data” in place of the “Edit” option depending on your MS Excel version. It will open the “Query Editor.”

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7] We want to make our first row the header. For this, click on the top left corner and select “Use first row as headers.”

8] To delete unwanted columns, click the top left corner and select “Choose columns.” After that, uncheck the boxes of the columns that you do not want and click OK.

9] Now, click “Close & Load” to load the data of Google Sheet in Excel.

You have connected your Google Sheet with Excel. Whenever you make any changes to Google Sheet, you have to wait for 5 minutes to get those changes publish on the web. After that, you can have to refresh the excel file to get these changes reflected in the Excel file. For this, go to “Data > Refresh All.”

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You must follow some more steps if you want Excel to update itself whenever you make changes to the Google Sheet.

1] Select the table and go to “Data > Connections.” This will open a window in which you have to select “Properties.”

2] Now, click the “Refresh every” checkbox and enter the time after which you want the Excel to update automatically. I have entered 5 minutes. If you enable the “Refresh data when opening the file” option, Excel will check for updates every time you open it. When you are done, click OK and close the previous window.