Creating a Real-Time Dashboard from Google Sheets

Google Sheets are an easy way to store tabular data in the form of spreadsheets. With Gradio and pandas, it’s easy to read data from public or private Google Sheets and then display the data or plot it. In this blog post, we’ll build a small real-time dashboard, one that updates when the data in the Google Sheets updates.

Building the dashboard itself will just be 9 lines of Python code using Gradio, and our final dashboard will look like this:

Prerequisites: This Guide uses Gradio Blocks, so make you are familiar with the Blocks class.

The process is a little different depending on if you are working with a publicly accessible or a private Google Sheet. We’ll cover both, so let’s get started!

Public Google Sheets

Building a dashboard from a public Google Sheet is very easy, thanks to the pandas library:

1. Get the URL of the Google Sheets that you want to use. To do this, simply go to the Google Sheets, click on the “Share” button in the top-right corner, and then click on the “Get shareable link” button. This will give you a URL that looks something like this:

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1UoKzzRzOCt-FXLLqDKLbryEKEgllGAQUEJ5qtmmQwpU/edit#gid=0

2. Now, let’s modify this URL and then use it to read the data from the Google Sheets into a Pandas DataFrame. (In the code below, replace the URL variable with the URL of your public Google Sheet):

import pandas as pd

URL = "https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1UoKzzRzOCt-FXLLqDKLbryEKEgllGAQUEJ5qtmmQwpU/edit#gid=0"
csv_url = URL.replace('/edit#gid=', '/export?format=csv&gid=')

def get_data():
    return pd.read_csv(csv_url)

3. The data query is a function, which means that it’s easy to display it real-time using the the gr.DataFrame component, or plot it real-time using the gr.LinePlot component (of course, depending on the data, a different plot may be appropriate). To do this, just pass the function into the respective components, and set the every parameter based on how frequently (in seconds) you would like the component to refresh. Here’s the Gradio code:

import gradio as gr

with gr.Blocks() as demo:
    gr.Markdown("# 📈 Real-Time Line Plot")
    with gr.Row():
        with gr.Column():
            gr.DataFrame(get_data, every=5)
        with gr.Column():
            gr.LinePlot(get_data, every=5, x="Date", y="Sales", y_title="Sales ($ millions)", overlay_point=True, width=500, height=500)

demo.queue().launch()  # Run the demo with queuing enabled

And that’s it! You have a dashboard that refreshes every 5 seconds, pulling the data from your Google Sheet.

Private Google Sheets

For private Google Sheets, the process requires a little more work, but not that much! The key difference is that now, you must authenticate yourself to authorize access to the private Google Sheets.

Authentication

To authenticate yourself, obtain credentials from Google Cloud. Here’s how to set up google cloud credentials:

1. First, log in to your Google Cloud account and go to the Google Cloud Console (https://console.cloud.google.com/)

2. In the Cloud Console, click on the hamburger menu in the top-left corner and select “APIs & Services” from the menu. If you do not have an existing project, you will need to create one.

3. Then, click the ”+ Enabled APIs & services” button, which allows you to enable specific services for your project. Search for “Google Sheets API”, click on it, and click the “Enable” button. If you see the “Manage” button, then Google Sheets is already enabled, and you’re all set.

4. In the APIs & Services menu, click on the “Credentials” tab and then click on the “Create credentials” button.

5. In the “Create credentials” dialog, select “Service account key” as the type of credentials to create, and give it a name. Note down the email of the service account

6. After selecting the service account, select the “JSON” key type and then click on the “Create” button. This will download the JSON key file containing your credentials to your computer. It will look something like this:

{
	"type": "service_account",
	"project_id": "your project",
	"private_key_id": "your private key id",
	"private_key": "private key",
	"client_email": "email",
	"client_id": "client id",
	"auth_uri": "https://accounts.google.com/o/oauth2/auth",
	"token_uri": "https://accounts.google.com/o/oauth2/token",
	"auth_provider_x509_cert_url": "https://www.googleapis.com/oauth2/v1/certs",
	"client_x509_cert_url": "https://www.googleapis.com/robot/v1/metadata/x509/email_id"
}

Querying

Once you have the credentials .json file, you can use the following steps to query your Google Sheet:

1. Click on the “Share” button in the top-right corner of the Google Sheet. Share the Google Sheets with the email address of the service from Step 5 of authentication subsection (this step is important!). Then click on the “Get shareable link” button. This will give you a URL that looks something like this:

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1UoKzzRzOCt-FXLLqDKLbryEKEgllGAQUEJ5qtmmQwpU/edit#gid=0

2. Install the gspread library, which makes it easy to work with the Google Sheets API in Python by running in the terminal: pip install gspread

3. Write a function to load the data from the Google Sheet, like this (replace the URL variable with the URL of your private Google Sheet):

import gspread
import pandas as pd

# Authenticate with Google and get the sheet
URL = 'https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1_91Vps76SKOdDQ8cFxZQdgjTJiz23375sAT7vPvaj4k/edit#gid=0'

gc = gspread.service_account("path/to/key.json")
sh = gc.open_by_url(URL)
worksheet = sh.sheet1

def get_data():
    values = worksheet.get_all_values()
    df = pd.DataFrame(values[1:], columns=values[0])
    return df

4. The data query is a function, which means that it’s easy to display it real-time using the the gr.DataFrame component, or plot it real-time using the gr.LinePlot component (of course, depending on the data, a different plot may be appropriate). To do this, we just pass the function into the respective components, and set the every parameter based on how frequently (in seconds) we would like the component to refresh. Here’s the Gradio code:

import gradio as gr

with gr.Blocks() as demo:
    gr.Markdown("# 📈 Real-Time Line Plot")
    with gr.Row():
        with gr.Column():
            gr.DataFrame(get_data, every=5)
        with gr.Column():
            gr.LinePlot(get_data, every=5, x="Date", y="Sales", y_title="Sales ($ millions)", overlay_point=True, width=500, height=500)

demo.queue().launch()  # Run the demo with queuing enabled

You now have a Dashboard that refreshes every 5 seconds, pulling the data from your Google Sheet.

Conclusion

And that’s all there is to it! With just a few lines of code, you can use gradio and other libraries to read data from a public or private Google Sheet and then display and plot the data in a real-time dashboard.