Specialized Media Dashboard: Automated data manipulation and reporting with Sheetgo

SMD

Specialized Media Dashboard (SMD) is a free Open Source media monitoring system that needs to keep up-to-date reports for Journalism & Law Enforcement.

By using Sheetgo, SMD was able to merge, categorize and report data from over 60 Google Sheets without creating and running complex scripts.

Merging over 60 spreadsheets into a single sheet

  • SMD needed to merge data from over 60 sheets
  • Struggle to gather, manipulate and categorize all the data without resorting to complex scripts

Specialized Media Dashboard was extracting data from multiple data sources into Google Sheets. The biggest challenge was combining and categorizing these datasets from multiple sheets into a single spreadsheet so they could manipulate and organize all the data.

Manual entry was not an option due to a large amount of information. Another option would be to create and run scripts, but this would have been very complex and time-consuming.

“The biggest issue was that all the data needed to be found in more than 60 sheets in an easy way without creating scripts, otherwise it would have been way too complex.”

Daniel Kwee, Specialized Media Dashboard

Daniel wanted to find a more affordable and practical solution that would allow him to merge and manipulate the data seamlessly. Not only did this solution need to be simple and easy to use, but it also needed to be reliable and flexible.

Automating data manipulation with Sheetgo

  • All the data from multiple sources merged into a single spreadsheet
  • Custom reports updated automatically
  • International crime news categorized automatically
  • Complex integrations made simple

Sheetgo has successfully helped in the early stage of the project and during its critical phases of engineering work for the prototype of the dashboard creation.

With the help of Sheetgo, Specialized Media Dashboard managed to fully automate the process of extracting, merging, and organizing all the international crime media articles scattered over multiple sheets.

“Sheetgo was used because it was the only tool with which I could merge more than 60 different sheets into 1, in order to categorize my data.”

Daniel Kwee, Specialized Media Dashboard

Sheetgo allowed SMD to integrate multiple data sources seamlessly and create custom reports updated automatically in Google Data Studio.

In this integration, Google Sheets pulls out data from Google News and categorizes all the information within separate spreadsheets. Whenever a new media article is published in Google News, the spreadsheets are updated automatically with other tools.

The Sheetgo integration merges data from all these spreadsheets into a single Google Sheets file. Finally, Specialized Media Dashboard used the data from this spreadsheet to create a custom report in Google Data Studio.

Creating an affordable and efficient solution with Sheetgo

  • Saving hours of work with a simple and efficient solution
  • Effortless data analysis
  • 100% up-to-date custom dashboard data

Sheetgo helped Specialized Media Dashboard create a solution that allowed them to manipulate a huge amount of data with just a few clicks and save hours of work.

Thanks to Sheetgo, they were able to manipulate and report data efficiently and effortlessly without having to write and run complex scripts.

“Sheetgo has an amazing support team. The support team demonstrated passion and patience in order to solve complex technical issues. They are geniuses!”

Daniel Kwee, Specialized Media Dashboard

Eventually, due to a large amount of data, Specialized Media Dashboard had to migrate to a MariaDB server.

Sheetgo has also helped update and modify several Google Sheets scripts and formulae in order to make them compatible with the MariaDB database.

SMD logo

Specialized Media Dashboard (SMD) is a project based on Google News and a free Open Source media monitoring system for Journalism & Law Enforcement. The SMD databases platform currently holds around 10 million media articles; 3M articles for the Crimes & Other incidents databases
and 7M articles for the COVID-19 pandemic database.

Colombia, France

Industry
Media

Features used

Google Sheets
Google Data Studio
Merge