Collaborate Using a Big Data Spreadsheet

Want to collaborate on millions of rows of data with your team members? Have more data than a traditional spreadsheet can handle? Gigasheet, a big data spreadsheet, is the solution you need.

Last week, I wanted five members of my team to work parallelly on a big data spreadsheet. My team ran a lead generation campaign in 2022 – which helped us generate over one million sales leads.

However, our C-level executives only wanted to target folks from Fortune 500 companies.

Now the challenge was – if I have a list of one million sales leads, filtering Fortune 500 leads from the rest is just too much to handle for one person. So, we decided to collaborate on the task – and we assigned different team members different areas -  

• Team Member A – Strip out domains from email addresses.
• Team Member B & C – Use Gigasheet’s Cross File VLOOKUP to flood my spreadsheet with names of Fortune 500 companies based on their domains.
• Team Member X – Perform the data cleanup operation after Team Members A, B, and C were done with their tasks.
• Team Member Y – Run personalized email nurture campaigns by narrowing down data using Gigasheet’s filters and grouping functionalities.

Imagine the time we’d have wasted – sending emails to each other as attachments and trying to make sense of the modified versions. It’d have been a nightmare! Plus, the files were likely too big to email, even if we had tried that approach.

The ability to share my spreadsheet with my team members helped us 10x our productivity and slashed the time we spent on our task in half.
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You Can Try Microsoft Excel or Google Sheets for Big Data Collaboration, BUT!

Sure, you can use Microsoft Excel (cloud) or Google Sheets to share your spreadsheets. They allow you to edit spreadsheets in real-time and view the version history (Gigasheet doesn’t do this).

However, when it comes to working on large spreadsheets, these platforms have their limitations:

1. Microsoft Excel’s maximum row and column limits are 1,048,576 and 16,384 respectively.
2. Google Sheets can process spreadsheet files (workbooks) with only ten million cells – not more. The maximum column limit is 18,278, and the upper limit for rows is 40,000.
3. Spreadsheets are limited by available system resources and memory. If your spreadsheet file size is too large or if you have performed a lot of operations on these spreadsheets, it may cause your system (Microsoft Excel) or browser (Google Sheets) to crash. Now, imagine if your browser or system crashes – and the changes you have performed are not even saved. That’d suck, won’t it?

And if you and your team members are not spreadsheet ninjas – you may end up spending hours learning how to filter, group, enrich and validate on Excel.

That’s the reason we allow companies to collaborate on big data spreadsheets.

How To Collaborate with Your Team on Big Data Spreadsheets

Collaborating with your team members on big data spreadsheets has never been easier. To share your spreadsheet with your team members, you can use Gigasheet’s Share functionality.

Let me show you how to do it.

Step I – Upload your spreadsheet to Gigasheet. Either you can drag your spreadsheet or use Gigasheet’s browse feature to upload the spreadsheet from local. Or you can import your spreadsheet from Google Drive, Dropbox, OneDrive, box or using the link to the spreadsheet.

Step II – Once the spreadsheet is uploaded and processed by Gigasheet, click on it to load it inside the Gigasheet editor.

Step III – See that glowing yellow Share button at the top? Click on it to share your spreadsheet. You’ll see this window –

Step IV – By default, the general access is set as “Restricted.” This means no one can access your spreadsheet besides you. If you want to share it with a select few people in your team, it makes sense to keep this restricted. You can invite your team members to collaborate with you on the spreadsheet by adding their emails in the “Invite by Email” box.

Step V – Once you have added your team members’ emails, click on “Invite” to send them an invitation. They will receive an invitation via their email like this-

Step VI – After you’re done granting them access, you can set their permissions as “view” or “view and edit” – depending on your preference. In the near future, if you want to revoke someone’s access, you can do it by clicking on “Share” and, next to their email – selecting “delete.”

On the other hand, if you want to share your spreadsheet with just about everyone, you can set “General Access” as “Public.” From there, you can copy the link – and share it with just about anyone.

Our founder, Jason Hines, loves sharing datasets (of public interest) on Reddit and other platforms.

You can also share spreadsheets with the applied filters or grouping – so that the person you have shared it with is able to make better sense of the data. For instance, in the example I shared above, if I wanted to share the information about Fortune 500 leads after arranging them by company name, I can just apply the filters and do the grouping – after which I can share the URL with them. The person viewing the spreadsheet will be able to see it with the applied filters and grouping.

Already impressed?

You’re a few clicks away from sharing your big data spreadsheet with your team members.

Sign up today!

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