You will need these keys for the next step. You can click on the Settings link under the data bucket name to see the Bucket Key and Access Key. You will see the new data bucket listed in your shelf. Click the Create button to create this new data bucket. You can set the name of this data bucket in the Name field. You can specify whatever Bucket Key you want in the New Stream Bucket dialog box. The second key is the Bucket Key, which is used to specify which data bucket in your account data should go into. One is your private account Access Key that will direct data into your account. To send data into this bucket, you need two keys. This will be the destination for our streamed Google Sheets data. Once you are registered and logged in, click the +cloud icon at the top of your bucket shelf to create a new data bucket. Register for an Initial State account at if you do not already have one (this will start a 14-day trial, no credit card required). Step 1: Create an Initial State data bucket Calling that function in our spreadsheet will be a piece of cake and let us send whatever data we want. We just need to write a function in Google Script that will send data to the Initial State API. Google Sheets has an awesome scripting feature that we can use to build a custom function to do just that. We just need to get Google Sheets to send data from our spreadsheet to our Initial State account when we want it sent. Once that data is in our account, we can display that data in visualizations and build a cool data dashboard that we can view in our web browser. In other words, if Temperature is 50 degrees at 5:45 PM, we can easily send that information as a data point to the Initial State API. Initial State is a data streaming service, which means you can push time-series data (i.e. Initial State ( info): A data streaming and visualization service that you can use to create real-time dashboards in your web browser (free for students, $9.99/mo or $99/yr for everyone else). Google Sheets ( info): A powerful spreadsheet you can use in your web browser (free). This tutorial will show you a simple, inexpensive way to create a beautiful, sharable, real-time updating dashboard from your Google Sheets data. The problem with most of these products is that they are typically expensive and difficult to set up. This is exactly why so many specialized data visualization and BI dashboard companies started popping up. However, they tend to be a rather boring tool for displaying / sharing KPIs and other key summary data. Spreadsheets excel at (see what I did there …) manipulating data in all kinds of crazy ways.
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