Many analysts live in spreadsheets like Google Sheets and Excel.  For analysts to be able to make confident data-driven decisions, their spreadsheet must have the most accurate,  up-to-date information.. That is not as easy as it sounds.  Getting the data into their spreadsheets often requires hours of copying and pasting, converting formats, and other time-consuming activities —  each time the analysts need updates.

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Our Solution

With Nexla, all it takes is five minutes of set up and one click each time you need to pull the best available data. To show how this works, we’re going to look at a specific use case. We’re pulling up-to-date currency conversions from a public API by OpenExchangeRates and integrating those figures into an example revenue report from different regions across the world. Doing so ensures you are operating on accurate insights, and with Nexla anyone can easily follow along without technical coding knowledge. Here’s how it’s done, which is shown in the video above as well.

Step-by-Step

1. Log-in to your Nexla dashboard and navigate to Flows > Create New Flow on the left.
2. Add your source and credentials whether it be an API, data warehouse, or any one of Nexla’s hundreds of connectors. For this walkthrough, select REST API and paste in the API URL: https://openexchangerates.org/api/latest.json?app_id=API_KEY
3. Now paste in the API URL that specifies the base currency is in US dollars: https://openexchangerates.org/api/latest.json?app_id=API_KEY&base={BaseCurrency=USD} and click Test to fetch a preview of the records and make sure it looks correct. Scroll down and select All Records, then click next in the top-right.
4. Once Nexla has detected a dataset from the source, click on the blue arrow to transform the dataset to fit your needs. During this step you can simply replicate everything detected, select the records you need, or apply more advanced transformations. In this case we’ll select just the currency records that are relevant to us, rename them, and then click next.
5. Select the option on the left to just write to a dataset.
6. Go back to your Google Sheet, and navigate to Add-Ons > Get Add-Ons and look up Nexla to install our connector from the G Suite Marketplace.
7. Now navigate to Add-Ons > Nexsets Connector > Configure to link your account by pasting in the secure access token after logging in.
8. Either click list nexsets right away, use a custom command that starts with =NEX_… directly in the sheet, or navigate to Add-Ons > Nexsets Connector > List Nexsets to select the dataset we just created.
9. Now that Nexla is fetching data directly into your sheet, you can link it to your existing data and update by simply fetching the data again. Nexla will automatically keep your dataset up-to-date as the source changes.

Conclusion

That’s it! Now you’ve linked up-to-the-minute currency data to your Google Sheet, and you can follow the same process to link data from anywhere to your Google Sheet. What used to be a tedious process that held businesses back can be a seamless and automatic integration with Nexla. A similar process will soon be released on Microsoft Excel as well. To learn more about use cases and request a demo, head to www.nexla.com