$1,000,000 Movie Data

PEOPLE
Ben Collins

Ben is one of the internet’s go to voices for Google Sheet’s knowledge. He teaches data analysis and automation with Google Sheets and Apps Script.

If you’ve ever searched for how to do something with Google Sheets and/or Apps Script, chances are good that you, like me, have stumbled across one of his articles or courses.

Ben is an expert - no, really he is a certified Google Developer Expert.

Ben’s website at benlcollins.com is a treasure trove of info for all things Sheets. He has a weekly newsletter that is easy to digest but full of valuable info, several courses and a catelog of tutorial articles in the Google Workspace ecosystem.

His latest course, AI Playbook for Google Sheets, launched recently and walks through many ways to use AI effectively with Google Sheets.

Go follow Ben and sign up for his newsletter; it’s given me more than a few solid Sheets tips to add to my toolkit! 👍

TOOLS
Apps Script

Ok, in honor of Ben, we’re highlighting Apps Script as our tool of the week. If you’ve been around a while, this may be a no-brainer that you’re already quite familiar with. But the more I learn about Apps Script the less I realize that I know.

And for the newbies, you have got to check it out.

Apps Script is a rapid application development platform. What the heck does that mean?

It lets us code Javascript inside our Google Workspace applications. That includes Sheets, Docs, Slides, etc. Here’s the intro to it from Google’s overview documentation:

Why do we care? Don’t we have functions and formulas galore in Google Sheets? Yes, but…

Apps Script unlocks a whole universe of options. Now we can programmatically alter our Sheets (and other apps) far beyond what we’re bound to with the built-in functions.

And we can even stitch services together. Check out this video I did where I use Apps Script inside a Google Sheet to add events to a Google Calendar. This is a small example of the capabilities; the rabbit hole runs deep!

DATASETS
$1M Netflix Data

Remember this?

Netflix offered a grand prize of $1,000,000 to the best algorithm to predict user ratings for films back in 2006, and the grand prize was given to the BellKor's Pragmatic Chaos team in 2009.

You can try to wrangle this dataset by downloading it from Kaggle. Unzipped, it’s a whopping 2.13 GB worth of txt and csv files consisting of movie ID’s, release years, titles, customer IDs, and ratings.

The prize is no longer there, but if you want to get a taste of what a HUGE dataset feels like, then look no further.

THANKS
YouTube && LinkedIn

Want me to highlight someone or something in the data world? Let me know!

👋Reach out on LinkedIn or by replying to this email if you’re reading the email version!

Here’s my YouTube channel; I make videos regularly - come check them out, and subscribe if they’re useful to you!

RESOURCES
For Your Own Data Adventures

Thank you so much!

It means a lot that you’ve read this, and I hope it’s informed and/or entertained you for a few moments today!

Would love to say hi. Here are the best places to find me:

✉️ LinkedIn
📺️ YouTube

Ways I can help:

• View my spreadsheet and creative products on my Gumroad store.

• Need a powerful automation tool for Google Sheets? Try Coefficient to automatically import data and sync with your business systems.

• Hire an expert to help complete your next Google Sheets, Apps Script or Google Workplace project.