OVERVIEW

1. Mockaroo

2. Kaggle

3. Gemini (in Sheets)

RESOURCES

Good tools to make life easier. You’re welcome :)

• Coefficient - Live spreadsheet connections to 60+ business systems

• Lido - Automate your spreadsheets; accurately extract date from PDFs

• TransactionPro - quickly import, export or delete data in Quickbooks

• beehiiv - my choice for a newsletter operating system

• Carrd - free one-page website builder

• Transistor - my favorite podcast host

Main Tutorial

Sometimes you need dummy data.

When I was preparing a Google Sheet earlier today, I needed to try out some operations on a table, but I didn’t have any particular data in mind.

So, the giant Ask Gemini menu caught my eye. I used it, and it was pretty helpful.

A word of caution: I have been pretty slow to adopt AI tooling in spreadsheets because it’s just not very good for anything past the basics.

And today, we’re talking basics. But in general, I remain convinced that you’re better served learning a good deal about spreadsheet operations before trying to have AI magic your solutions into place.

Here are three sources, including Gemini, that I like to use for quick mock data:

Mockaroo

This is a dead simple site that lets you generate big .csv files with whatever kind of mock data you can think of.

They're free to use, although it looks like they do have a paid version if you need it. I’ve only ever gone there for the free, quick data.

You add as many fields as you want, name them, select what type they are and then add in any options.

I’ve never used the options.

They’ve got a zillion field types to choose from.

This is typically my first choice.

Check out Mockaroo here.

Kaggle

If you’re looking for something more specific, Kaggle may be your better pick. They provide a ton of datasets for free, and it’s honestly overwhelming the amount of data over there.

The datasets are only a portion of Kaggle’s data ecosystem and community now, and the advantage of using Kaggle is that you’re getting real data from virtually any field you can imagine.

If you’ve never checked them out, you owe it to yourself. It’s a really neat platform, and they even have data competitions, game arenas and coding challenges.

Check out Kaggle here.

Gemini

If you’ve used Google Sheets at all in the past year, you’ve seen the proliferation of AI tooling, menus, sidebars and nudges in the UI.

Excel’s no different - Microsoft has been incorporating Copilot into their product for the past few years too.

Currently, whenever you open a new Google Sheet, there’s a tables sidebar that pops up and asks if you’d like to generate a table with the click of a button.

I’ve honestly never found this extremely useful except for dummy data situations, but maybe it can be a good starting point if you really dislike pressing CTRL + ALT + T to generate a table from your own dataset.

A little while ago, I also noticed the new menu in the toolbar: Ask Gemini.

It’s really less of a menu of tools than a menu of starter prompts for Gemini…which if you didn’t know it, was sitting up in the top right next to your Google Workspace icon.

Selecting any of the options in the Ask Gemini toolbar just opens up that Gemini dialog and lets you prompt it as you would any other modern LLM chat model.

I randomly asked it to give me some census data purely to see what it would do, and it did a fair job: 16 rows with year, state, population, median income, poverty rate and education level.

At the bottom of the chart, it has another little dialog that suggests I “Visualize Year by Poverty Rate (%)”.

I’ve found that it does this a lot these days: it’s using the context of whatever tables are in our spreadsheets to suggest data visualizations for them.

And, yes, it will create exactly that. Without changing anything and merely accepting the first column chart it spit out, here’s what it gave me: A pivot table and chart inserted into a new sheet:

There’s a lot left to desire here, but we’re moving in the right direction, I think.

Just don’t forget to learn the basics so you know what is going on even if you are using AI to generate sheets, functions and Apps Script.

Check out my free basics course here and send it to that co-worker who’s always lost.

Sign up for the upcoming Apps Script course below (I should have a preview soon).

NEXT STEPS

Whenever you’re ready, here’s how I can help:

1. Work with me
   I am available for consulting projects. Reach out and let’s chat.

2. Business tech stack
   My recommendations for software and tools I use to create content and run my online business.

3. Personal budget tool
   As a Got Sheet subscriber, I want you to have a 50% discount on the personal finance system I update every year.

4. YouTube

   If you aren’t subscribed yet, come on over to my YouTube channel where I make all my spreadsheet, coding and productivity tutorials

HAPPY SPREADSHEETING!

Enjoyed this issue?
Subscribe below or Leave a testimonial

Cheers, Eamonn
Connect on LinkedIn, YouTube & Twitter.