At Google's Cloud Next ‘19 event in San Francisco last year, the search giant launched in beta the ability to analyze huge volumes of BigQuery data with Connected Sheets. Today, that capability reached general availability for G Suite Enterprise and Enterprise for Education customers.
Google announced today that Connected Sheets is rolling out to those users beginning on June 30. The release will continue over the next few weeks and culminate within this month. With this tool, you can connect Sheets with up to 10 billion rows of BigQuery data for analysis without SQL scripts. This lets you extract insights in Sheets and understand that data using existing tools such as formulas, pivot tables, and charts. The company noted in a blog post:
"This makes it easier for more members of your organization to understand, collaborate on, and generate insights from data. Specifically, it can help subject matter experts work with data without relying on analysts, who may be less familiar with the context of the data or be overloaded with a wide range of data requests."
Connected Sheets is intended as a replacement for Sheets data collector and it will retain all of the latter's features. On top of those capabilities, the new release allows you to "analyze and visualize data in Sheets without needing to first extract the data." That means you can preview data and schedule data refreshes to avoid analyzing stale data.
