But a little planning can go far. Tracking prices ahead of the big holiday sales can be incredibly helpful when it comes to getting more bang for your buck. And if you start early this year, you can even skip the lines, the rush, and any stock or supply chain problems that may arise. But that’s just the very tip of the iceberg—spreadsheet programs can be incredibly powerful, and add-ons can make them even more impressive. Google has an entire library of optional widgets called Google Workspace Marketplace. It works just like the extension store in your browser, and you can take your pick from thousands of tools to add some oomph to the programs you use daily. Using this function, you can easily create a holiday wish list for the items you want, which will serve as a basic budget and a useful baseline parameter in case prices change. ImportFromWeb has all these descriptors, but you’ll need to use the correct names for them, which you’ll type in the first row of each column. A product name is called title, while the price is sale_price, or list_price, if you want to know the original amount the manufacturer priced the item for. Separate the parameter with a comma, and type in the coordinates of the cells where you want the data to display. You can add these coordinates one by one, but using a range is easier. For that, type in the coordinate for the first cell in the range, and after a colon, type the coordinate of the last cell in the range. For example, if your descriptors go from columns C to H, you’ll type C2:H2. Notice how we used C2 instead of C3, which is the actual coordinate of the highlighted cell in the image above. This is because your descriptor row is officially row number 1 (we told you that detail would be important later). You can save yourself some confusion if you, unlike the example above, use the first row in the spreadsheet as your descriptor row. Still, it’s useful to know how this all works if, for whatever reason, you want to start your table further down. Finish setting up your formula by closing the parentheses and hitting Enter or Return on your keyboard. In a moment, you’ll see data magically appearing in your spreadsheet. Congratulations—you’ve got your first row of data lined up and ready! Give yourself a pat on the back. You’re doing great. Technically, this limitation is true, but there’s an easy workaround—type dollar signs before each character of the coordinates determining the range of cells where you want the data to display, and the formula will work with any other web page address you paste under the first one. Following the previous example, your coordinates will go from C2:H2 to $C$2:$H$2. Now, paste more URLs in your Link column, and then click on the cell where the formula is—the one to the right of the first link. You’ll notice a blue outline appears around the cell with a blue square in the bottom right corner of it. Click that square and drag it down so that it extends down the column to the length of your list of links. Wait a couple of seconds and voilá—you’ve got data. If you see an #EVALUATION_FAILED or #ERROR_IN_SELECTORS notice, that means there’s something wrong with the formula you’re using. Go back, look at it carefully, and make sure the parameters you used are correct and that you altered the formula so it works with links in other cells. As you paste more links to your spreadsheet, you can just select the last cell in the formula column and drag the blue square to tell ImportFromWeb to go fetch the corresponding data for that new item on your list. Use this file as a baseline and don’t forget to complement your holiday shopping strategy with other methods to track down sales and hard-to-find products. Happy savings!
