7 Best Beginner Tutorials Featuring the INDEX() Google Sheet Formula

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You might have seen this INDEX formula everywhere. It's a great useful little formula that helps you get the particular piece of data you're looking for. I use it a lot to find the first item in a list. Pairing INDEX with MATCH is a great replacement for Vlookup. Pairing INDEX, with FILTER, makes for a great way to find the first result of a filter. Or the top result. Or the 2nd if you use "2" inside the INDEX.

What is INDEX?

INDEX is the formula that is responsible for returning the contents of a cell found within an input range. The value of a cell is identified by row and column offset. Think of it like the index of a book, which helps you find what you’re looking for with just a glance. Here is the syntax for the INDEX formula:

INDEX(range, row_num, column_num)

For beginners, all this might sound a bit confusing. Don’t let that stop you and keep learning. We have 7 tutorials on INDEX and we won’t just tackle the technicalities. We’ll do things even better because we’re Better Sheets! See the list of our tutorials and learn about the fun and cool things that you can do with INDEX.

Announcing Sell Daily and How I Built Sell Daily

In this video, we go over the details of Sell Daily. I also give a walk-through of all the functionalities.

Sell Daily is a sheet I created that can be used in tweets, emails, promotions, and even Facebook ads. They are a list of powerful words that can help you sell. With this Google Sheet, you can tweet these words each day. You can even set them up in such a way that you can send yourself email reminders! That’s pretty cool.

Watch the video tutorial to find out more about Sell Daily – How I built it, what you can use it for, and the ways you can use it.

Find First Car in a Row

In this tutorial, I’m going to walk you through a solution to the question: “How do I find first car in a row?”

The relation is the car one along the first row. Where does that start? The same question applies for cars two and three. I’ll show you how to get the information for those in this video tutorial. The INDEX formula is used and you’ll learn how to apply that to get the answer to the question.

Insert Random New Quotes in Your Google Sheets (Every Edit/Open)

This is a pretty quick video tutorial where I show you how a one formula combo makes it possible to insert random new quotes in your sheet. There’s a list of quotes and any time you edit the sheet, the quote changes. The quote can also change anytime when the sheet is opened. You can also simply reload or refresh the page and the quote will change.

I will walk you through how you can get exactly that: Have a random quote show up at your sheet. It’s fun and quite easy. You can apply this same concept when you’re creating prompts or writing tweets that you want to send out later. You don’t even have to read down the entire list to find them and that’s pretty cool.

Find first and last of filter by date

We cover things about filters, not just going over what the index does but how the filter actually works. I go over the steps on how you can find first and last of filter date while showing you the formulas and functions. This makes it easy to follow, which is perfect for beginners.

How To Create An AutoFill in Google Sheets

For this tutorial, I’ll show you how to make a dropdown and we’ll answer the question, “Why autofill?” I’ll also talk about using VLOOKUP to find urls and using INDEX / MATCH.

By the time you are finished with this tutorial, you can really type anything and find what you’re looking for. Hopefully, this helps you out.

Add Pics to Marketplace in a Google Sheet

Can we add pictures to Marketplace? Yes, absolutely. I’ll show you how to do that in this tutorial.

First things first: The image you want to add to Marketplace has to exist online somewhere. You’ll need its url for this to work.

I’ll also show you how you can resize the image in Google Sheets, so that it doesn’t show up so tiny. I’ll even show you how to make your sheet look better, because we’re Better Sheets! Watch the video tutorial and learn today.

Secure Your Sheets by BetterSheets.co

The things I’ll teach you in this video is less tactical and more strategic. I’ll show you some tactics on how to keep your sheet secure. We’ll also talk about what to do and not do when creating and sharing sheets. I’ll also show you some features that you may not know about and share with you some creative use cases for those.

For fun and free tutorials featuring this formula, you can check out these other videos:

• Use Index Match when you want Vlookup
• Adding a Foodcourt to Doc's Virtual Mall | Sheet Improvement!
• Escape Spreadsheet Hell