We recently announced the general availability of Connected Sheets, which brings you the power and scale of a BigQuery data warehouse in the familiar context of Google Sheets. With Connected Sheets, you can analyze billions of rows and petabytes of data in Sheets without specialized knowledge of computer languages like SQL. This makes it easy for anyone, not just data analysts, to apply pivot tables, charts, and formulas to massive datasets and unlock insights.

Our customers use Connected Sheets to enable data-driven decision-making across their organizations. We’ve heard many stories about how Connected Sheets has enabled them to achieve operational efficiencies and new ways of unlocking the power of their data; we’d like to share a few here.

Operate with agility

Now more than ever, it’s critical for organizations to react with flexibility and agility to new realities. Connected Sheets helps organizations harness and collaborate on massive amounts of data, making it easier to understand and quickly respond to today’s dynamic landscape. 

The United Nations Office for Project Services (UNOPS) helps the UN and its partners deliver peace and security, humanitarian, and development solutions. As COVID-19 emerged, UNOPS used Connected Sheets to help coordinate a swift global response. Says Tushar Dighe, Chief Information Officer at UNOPS, “When the COVID-19 pandemic started, we needed to quickly assess the status of our operational capacity in order to assist governments with the response. We used a Connected Sheet with data from our BigQuery data warehouse combined with manual status inputs on the same Sheet, where colleagues in more than 80 countries were able to collaboratively provide inputs. The results in the form of pivots and charts were instantly available live. It took less than three hours to design and implement the solution, and we had status information from more than 80 countries within the first 24 hours.”

Improve business and financial reporting

Reports and dashboards displaying business metrics, like revenue figures or operational KPIs, play a critical role in organizations. These reports help sales teams track performance, enable finance teams to make projections, and provide business leaders with a picture of their organization’s health. Especially now, as businesses adapt their planning to reflect the new normal and employees remain dispersed, it’s doubly important that teams can quickly access and collaborate on business and financial dashboards, from wherever they are. But building and maintaining these reports can be time consuming and error-prone, and requests for changes or new views result in manual work for data analysts. All of this just extends the time to insight and action. 

Connected Sheets helps automate report creation, while maintaining a single source of truth for data in BigQuery. The live connection between BigQuery and Sheets also means that data stays fresh, minimizing the risk that people make decisions based on outdated information and avoiding the data integrity risks of manual data pulls. 

Says Alexander Danilowicz, a Software Engineer at data connectivity company LiveRamp, “Our Finance team uses Connected Sheets to automate reports that are shared with other stakeholders to run the business. This enables our business partners to analyze and create pivot tables on massive datasets, which is not possible in a traditional spreadsheet.”

“Now that it’s all integrated, there’s no human error involved. Changes can be made at the click of a button, resulting in 10 hours saved per month,” he adds.

Track product adoption

It’s important for teams across the business to understand customer adoption of products and services, whether it’s the product team tracking usage of a newly released feature or the support team trying to anticipate incoming service requests. Similarly,  IT teams need to analyze adoption of an organization’s internal applications and systems, so they know what tools employees are using and how they are being used. But product adoption datasets are often too large for traditional spreadsheets to handle, and new data is continuously being added. 

Connected Sheets can provide teams access to large, powerful, and up-to-date usage datasets, in the familiar Sheets interface. PwC, a global professional services organization, uses Connected Sheets as part of its efforts to make technology and data more accessible across its workforce. One way PwC uses Connected Sheets is to monitor and analyze internal adoption of tools like G Suite. 

Says Peter Van Nieuwerburgh, Global Change Manager at PwC, “If you look at our own adoption dashboarding, it’s more than three terabytes of data—good luck putting that in any spreadsheet. With Connected Sheets, we’re not really pulling the data into the spreadsheet, rather it lives in the database where it belongs. The ability to go and so easily analyze and visualize the data is really powerful.”

We hope Connected Sheets helps to scale data-driven decision making at your organization, by making powerful data easily accessible across your sales, finance, product, and IT teams.

Born in Iran as a refugee during the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, I understand the challenges many people face there to get access to formal education. I was one of eight children in a progressive, yet financially limited, family. We left everything behind in Herat to move to a new country. To make ends meet, my mother sold handmade clothing. She invested what little she earned in my education, which made it possible for me to finish high school. 

While opportunities for education in Afghanistan have increased over the past few decades, there are still many barriers that stand in the way of education for Afghan women—familial expectations, socioeconomic circumstances, cultural stigmas, societal norms and even safety issues. These circumstances make it challenging for women to find work and explain why only 19 percent participate in the workforce, 84 percent lack formal education and are often illiterate, and just 2 percent have access to higher education.

2001 marked the fall of the Taliban in Afghanistan, and many Afghan families, including my own, found hope in their motherland again. The next year, I returned to Herat. Seeing my peers —women just like me with so much potential—I felt compelled to do something. But I knew that in order to help others, I first needed to further my own education. I earned a bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, and later a Master’s degree from the Technical University of Berlin in Germany. 

When I returned to Afghanistan after school, I hoped to share my newly-minted tech skills with Herat women by teaching at the local university. At the time, few women were participating in the public workforce and there were still many extremist, conservative views in the country. I was vocal about inequalities and faced backlash from the community; because of these threats, I came to the United States as an asylum seeker in 2012. 

After arriving in the United States, I was inspired to start Code to Inspire, the first coding school for girls in Afghanistan between the ages of 15 and 25 that provides free after school education in gaming, web development, graphic design, mobile applications and full stack development. Our goal is to empower women with the skills they need to program so that they can drive change in their communities and gain equal access to opportunities and financial independence.

Determined to make this coding school happen, I found myself faced with an interesting obstacle: how could I build an education center in Afghanistan without ever leaving the US? 

To make this possible, I turned to technology—just as I had hoped my future students would. I took a side job teaching Farsi to pay my bills, and built the blueprint for Code to Inspire from a laptop in Brooklyn. I managed everything from my computer working from cafes in New York: fundraising, shipping equipment, recruiting mentors, registering applicants, and developing the curriculum.

To move things forward day-to-day, I use G Suite to communicate and collaborate with my team. I use Hangouts Meet to connect with students remotely during weekly calls and monthly check-ins. We use Google Docs, Sheets and Slides to create essential documents and keep track of our operations. We even used Slides for our first pitch deck, which I shared with my board to get their feedback. This power and connectivity enabled a refugee to make her dream come true, and built up the digital literacy of the women I was working with back home!

Since opening its doors, 150 girls have studied with us, and the students have created so many interesting projects. One inspiring example is the popular mobile game, Afghan Hero Girl, which has taken off in Afghanistan and abroad, and was even recognized by the local government. The girls developed the game to show a female protagonist dressed in traditional Afghan garb, who undergoes obstacles that are relatable to them.  

Over 50 women have graduated from Code to Inspire, and 20 have secured remote full-time employment and freelance projects. Many of these women are even out-earning their male relatives who have become huge supporters of the program.

By 2030, we hope to open two additional schools in Kabul and Mazar that can serve up to 500 girls and provide employment opportunities within six months of graduation. From the ruins of a shattered nation and shattered lives of refugees can come treasure, if we know where to find it. For me, the girls in Afghanistan are the treasure and investing in their education is the future of a peaceful Afghanistan.

When the world was forced to go primarily online, state governments also faced the reality of needing to provide community services without the health risk of meeting in person. Old systems that relied on interpersonal contact could not keep up. An unprecedented number of displaced workers swamped every unemployment system. The capacity challenges weren’t limited to state labor departments either. Everything from birth certificates and marriage licenses to apostilles and court system services that could usually be handled by a simple walk-in had to be scheduled in advance. Both internal and external communication suffered. 

To meet these challenges, many organizations turned to new technology solutions and innovative approaches.

How VAST helped Arizona get back to work

The State of Arizona had tens of thousands of constituents who relied on pandemic unemployment insurance and would also need tools to reenter the workforce.Tim Tucker, Deputy Administrator of the Workforce Development Administration for the Arizona Department of Economic Security, started preparing in late 2020. He collaborated with Google Cloud and SADA to introduce the Virtual Appointment Scheduling Tool (VAST) to State of Arizona staff members. Using VAST reduced the excessive workload taken on by the Workforce Development Administration as they got Arizona back to work. VAST lets constituents book an appointment, upload documents and forms, and conduct career counseling virtually. This helped constituents move through the system faster so they could successfully reenter the workforce.

That preparation paid off. As of September 2021, Arizona had recovered the majority of the jobs lost during the pandemic. It has also seen one of the smallest percent change in employment compared with pre-pandemic numbers. Even more impressive, Arizona is one of only five states where unemployment claims are now lower than pre-pandemic numbers. Using VAST helped them get people back to work faster and has become a permanent part of their unemployment program.

Bringing streamlined services to the community

To fully realize a solution to the challenges faced by our public sector customers, we focused on three key areas in which we knew we needed VAST to excel:

• Efficient staff allocation
• Streamlined internal meetings
• Confident constituent interactions

We also knew our customers needed to get VAST online fast, and it needed to work with existing infrastructure without requiring a total overhaul. These areas informed the design of VAST’s features and have allowed us to meet the challenges faced by agencies such as the Arizona Department of Economic Security.

Virtual Agent support and integrations

VAST gives constituents 24×7 virtual agent support powered by  Google Cloud’s contact center AI virtual agents. Virtual agents are custom programmed to fit the specific needs of each agency and community they serve. It’s easy to add new options and information whenever an update is needed. Virtual agents can be designed to understand the user’s intent and serve up relevant content for a smooth user experience on both ends of the system. Virtual agents run at scale and offer multi-language support, ensuring they can serve everyone in the community. By pairing these with VAST, constituents can experience seamless self-service. 

6 week deployment time

Most of our public sector clients needed a solution yesterday. VAST can be deployed rapidly, taking about six weeks from start to finish, which includes everything–even staff training time.

 Integration with Google Workspace and Chrome

VAST securely integrates with other Google solutions, such as Google Workspace and Chromebooks. We work to ensure VAST is fully functional within your existing systems.

Collaboration and support

SADA collaborates with each organization to ensure that the design, development, and functionality of VAST align with their needs. SADA specializes in helping public sector customers migrate to Google Cloud. 

Analytics

Application administrators have access to analytic data gathered by VAST and options to customize and add additional datasets.This data helps organizations find blind spots in coverage, fix service bottlenecks, and better organize internal resources. Leveraging this data gives organizations the power to make changes, resulting in everything from a smoother customer experience to cost savings.

To learn more about how Google Cloud has supported Arizona during the pandemic, check out this blog on how their vaccination distribution system leveraged Google Cloud to get the vaccine to more people. For more information on how VAST can streamline a customer experience.

When Bigbasket was founded in December 2011, it guaranteed to deliver goods within a one-hour delivery slot of its customers’ choosing or it would refund them 10 percent of their orders. The company also introduced an express service, delivering groceries within 90 minutes of an order being placed.

Bigbasket needed a mapping platform that could help it meet its delivery times, and offer a familiar interface to customers. MediaAgility, a digital consulting company, recommended Google Maps Platform to Bigbasket.

When customers use the Bigbasket mobile app to place orders, they select their locations on a Google Map. The prices and availability of groceries varies according to location, so a customer’s location determines the cost of the order and what can be ordered.

Google Maps Platform Results

• Bigbasket handles more than one million orders per month, and delivers in more than two dozen cities in India
• Bigbasket now has more than four million customers
• Orders are delivered on time, increasing customer loyalty

It is also used to determine driver routes. Bigbasket used the Maps Javascript API to build a web-based app for the company’s backend that tracks all orders and delivery progress. Dispatchers use the Directions API to match drivers with orders and customers, and the Distance Matrix API to get estimate the time of arrival for deliveries. As dispatchers track the progress of deliveries on the map, they can tweak routes as necessary.

“We’ve built Bigbasket from the ground up using Google Maps Platform. It makes sure we have the right customer locations and deliver to them on time. We couldn’t have started Bigbasket without Google Maps. It helps us to be fast and efficient, and make sure our customers get what they’ve ordered quickly,” said Pramod Jajoo, Chief Technology Officer, Bigbasket