HowToAtlas is a hands-on resource for people who work with spreadsheets, automation tools, and AI every day. Whether you’re building a KPI dashboard in Google Sheets, cleaning up a messy CSV export, or setting up your first Zapier workflow, you’ll find step-by-step guides, copy-paste formulas, and downloadable templates that get the job done without the fluff.
Everything on this site is written for practitioners — marketers, ops managers, small business owners, and anyone else who’d rather spend 20 minutes following a guide than two hours figuring it out from scratch. Every template is free to download, every formula is tested, and every guide includes the “why” alongside the “how.”
Google Sheets & Excel Guides
Google Sheets is one of the most powerful free tools available — if you know how to use it beyond the basics. Our Sheets guides focus on real business tasks: building dashboards that update themselves, reconciling data between two systems, cleaning up exports that arrived in terrible shape, and creating templates your whole team can reuse.
Each guide includes formulas you can copy directly into your spreadsheet, plus explanations of how they work so you can adapt them to your specific data. We cover both Google Sheets and Excel syntax where they differ.
Featured Sheets Guides
Google Sheets KPI Dashboard Template — Build a live dashboard in about 20 minutes using a free template. Connect your own data, customize the charts, and ship clean reports to your team without any add-ons or paid tools. The guide walks you through the three-layer architecture (Data → Model → View) that keeps everything resilient when your underlying data changes.
Reconcile Two Spreadsheets: 3 Reliable Methods — When you need to compare two lists and find what matches, what’s missing, and where the data disagrees. Covers VLOOKUP/XLOOKUP for quick lookups, INDEX-MATCH for maximum flexibility, and QUERY joins for more complex reconciliation scenarios. Includes conditional formatting rules to visually highlight discrepancies.
CSV Cleanup Playbook — A collection of copy-paste recipes for the most common data cleanup tasks: deduplicating rows, splitting names into first and last, normalizing phone numbers, trimming invisible characters, and more. Also includes an Apps Script you can run with one click to automate the tedious parts.
Browse all Sheets & Excel guides →
Templates & Planning Tools
Templates save time because someone else has already solved the structural problem — you just bring your data. Our templates are Google Sheets and Google Docs files that you can copy to your own Drive in one click. They include built-in formulas, data validation, and documentation so you can start using them immediately without reading a manual.
Featured Templates
UTM Builder Template — Generate clean UTM tracking links that your analytics can actually trust. The template enforces lowercase naming conventions, validates required fields, and logs every link your team creates so you never lose track of what campaign names you’ve used. Includes a taxonomy guide and a QA checklist for catching common mistakes before they pollute your reports.
KPI Dashboard Template — Drop in your metrics and get a live dashboard with auto-updating charts. Designed with a three-layer structure that separates raw data from calculations from the visual layer, so nothing breaks when you add new rows or change your reporting period.
CSV Cleanup Toolkit — A ready-to-use workbook with cleanup formulas pre-built for deduplication, phone normalization, name splitting, and whitespace removal. Paste your messy data in, get clean data out.
AI & Automation Workflows
AI tools and no-code automation platforms have changed what one person can accomplish in a day. But the gap between “this tool exists” and “here’s exactly how to use it for your specific task” is still enormous. Our automation guides bridge that gap with concrete workflows you can implement today — not theoretical overviews of what’s possible.
We cover tools like ChatGPT, Claude, Zapier, and Make (formerly Integromat), with a focus on practical applications: generating product descriptions at scale, automating data entry between systems, building internal tools without writing code, and creating repeatable SOPs that your team can follow.
Featured AI & Automation Guides
AI Product Description Generator — A complete SOP for turning raw product bullet points into on-brand descriptions using AI. Includes a prompt library with templates for short marketplace listings, SEO-optimized descriptions, and batch processing via Google Sheets. Also covers the review workflow you need to catch factual errors and prohibited claims before publishing.
Browse all automation guides →
How HowToAtlas Is Different
There are thousands of “how to use VLOOKUP” articles on the internet. Most of them tell you what the function does. Very few tell you why your VLOOKUP is returning #N/A even though the values look identical (it’s probably trailing spaces or a text-vs-number mismatch), or when you should use INDEX-MATCH instead, or what happens when your lookup column has duplicates.
That’s the gap HowToAtlas fills. Every guide here is written for the person who’s already tried the basics and ran into a wall. We explain the formulas, but we also explain what breaks them and how to fix it when it does. We include the edge cases, the gotchas, and the real-world context that makes the difference between a formula that works in a tutorial and one that works on your actual data.
All content is written by practitioners who use these tools daily — not generated from documentation summaries. If a template is worth downloading, it’s because we’ve used a version of it ourselves.
Recently Updated
- Google Sheets KPI Dashboard Template — Step-by-Step Guide
- UTM Builder (Free Google Sheets Template) + Best Practices
- Reconcile Two Spreadsheets: 3 Reliable Methods
- CSV Cleanup Playbook: Deduplicate, Split, Normalize
- AI Product Description Generator: Prompts + SOP
Popular This Month
- Google Sheets KPI Dashboard — The most-visited guide on the site. If you need to build a reporting dashboard fast, start here.
- UTM Builder Template — Our most-downloaded template. Keeps your campaign tracking consistent across your team.
- Reconcile Two Spreadsheets — The guide people find when VLOOKUP isn’t giving them the answers they expect.
About This Site
HowToAtlas is an independent resource built by people who spend their days working with spreadsheets, automation tools, and data. We started this site because we kept solving the same problems over and over for different teams and clients, and figured it was worth writing the solutions down properly once — with the context and edge cases that most tutorials leave out.
We don’t accept sponsored content or paid reviews. When we recommend a tool, it’s because we’ve used it. When a template is free, it’s actually free — no email gate, no upsell, no “premium version” behind a paywall. If you find our content useful, sharing it with someone who’d benefit is the best way to support what we do.