Ho do I stop and start autoupdating in Google Sheets? - google-sheets

I have a spreadsheet in which a few sheets are very complex formulas which take a while to run. I want to be able to update the support pages and only run the sheets with formulas when they have focus. Is there anyway to do this in Google Sheets?

As I understand, the recalculation settings in Google Sheets only have effect for certain functions like NOW and RAND.
The alternative is to use scripts instead of formulas.
References
Change locale, time zone, and recalculation settings - Docs editors help
Related
Formulas always recalculating when refreshing/loading spreadsheet

Related

With zapier & Google Sheets: How do I trigger a new line in the entire spreadsheet?

I'm a bit puzzled. I can't set Zapier to trigger when a new line is added to any sheet on a Google spreadsheet. They force you to choose a specific sheet. Any way around it?
Cheers!
You will need to create a different "Zap" event for each sheet. To my knowledge, there is no way around that.
However, the fact that you think Zapier should be able to have a single Zap be triggered by multiple sheets implies a couple or things:
1.) You're not yet sure what a "Zap" is.
2.) Your data in each separate sheet is very similar. And this causes me to wonder if your overall spreadsheet setup is less than ideal. Many people wind up setting up separate sheets for data collection, whereas in most cases, data collection should only be done in one sheet setup as a standard database, while other sheets show the data in different arrangements (i.e., reports).
You haven't given much detail or provided a link to the spreadsheet. But perhaps this will prompt you to dive into understanding Zapier a bit better and reconsidering the layout of your spreadsheet(s).

How to work around GOOGLEFINANCE failures?

I need historical data of currency exchange rates for my gooogle sheet and GOOGLEFINANCE function is just what i need. Here is the sheet with GOOGLEFINANCE data I copied from my project:
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/15cFmrS2IL6QZMJORCJxU16QtWQ-2hFNLORgM5pEgY_E/edit?usp=sharing
The problem is that sometimes (pretty often actually) GOOGLEFINANCE function crashes and returns error breaking the whole project:
that's how it looks when it crashes
It returns to normal after a while but it's really disturbing.
I couldn't think of a good way to work around that glitch so I'm asking for your help.
I thought about making cells with the following logic: IF GOOGLEFINANCE value is not blank then copy it ELSE keep old value making GOOGLEFINANCE return persistent but I'm not sure it's possible to do with Google Spreadsheets formulas.
For example above if we want to make L4 cell to contain persistent value of C4 cell, I want L4 formula to be like:
=IF(ISBLANK(C4),L4,C4) but then cell will refer to itself which is not allowed.
This is not possible without Apps Script
This is because sheet functions aka formulae, don't write values to cells. If you need to persist data, then you need Apps Script.
Unfortunately, GOOGLEFINANCE cannot be accessed outside of Spreadsheet formula. From https://workspaceupdates.googleblog.com/2016/09/historical-googlefinance-data-no-longer.html
it (is) not be possible to download historical data or access it outside of Sheets using Apps Script or an API.
Workaround (with Apps Script)
However, it is possible to set up an Apps Script function to read the displayed value of a cell with getDisplayValue(), and copy that to a backup sheet, where you somehow store historical data.
You could have a setup where you have one sheet with the GOOGLEFINANCE formula, another sheet with the backup values, and a final "Report" sheet. Then you could write another Apps Script function to examine both the sheets and build an output.
Further, you could set this up to run with Time-driven triggers, and it would be quite hands off.
References and further reading
getDisplayValue()
Time-driven triggers
Apps Script Tutorials

How do we prevent Google Sheets from slowing down

We are using Google sheets for simultaneous entry of several users. We observe that after a number of users start to entry at the same time, Google sheets starts to slow down.
We have a stable internet connection. What can we do to keep Google Sheets from slowing down? Do we limit the number of users use the Google sheet at the same time? Is there any optimization we can do?
You are likely witnessing a correlation not a causation between the number of users entering information on the sheet and the speed of the sheet.
Is there conditional formatting on the sheet? Are there a lot of formulas? What kinds of functions are in the formulas?
The thing that is likely slowing the sheet down is the number of calculations being made that are dependent on the cells in which your users are entering information. This makes it difficult to both diagnose and advise on the next best course of action.

Hide formulas from non editors

The goal is to hide the formulas in the cells in order to show only the data to the users in the very same spreadsheet.
Why? Currently I'm showing some information to the teams, but the formulas contain info that these teams shouldn't be able to know.
To minimize the problem I'm importing most of the data using formulas such IMPORTRANGE or QUERY but even those methods show the URL of the original spreadsheet.
Use a Script to copy isn't a viable solution due the amount of data and frequency some those sheets receive updates.

Disable automatic calculation for Google Spreadsheet

is it possible to specify to Google spreadsheet not to recalculate a specific sheet or number of cell everytime a modification is done ?
I have a very heavy sheet and it's very slow everytime i made a tiny modification, even if it's in an another sheet.
Seems that this feature is not supported by Google Spreadsheets. From a cursory search online the easiest way to work around this limitation is to make your formulas all conditional on a trigger. ie =IF(Boolean_Trigger,Your_formula,""). Trigger could be a cell, Named range, etc. Regards,

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