How-To

How to Create QR Codes in Google Sheets

By Adam Davidson

Updated December 20, 2023

QR codes are a great way to share a web link, and you can make them yourself. Learn how to create QR codes in Google Sheets in this guide.

Unless you’ve been living under a rock, you’ll have come across QR codes. These strange, pixelated squares are everywhere, and for good reason. They make it easy to quickly access information through a smartphone just by pointing your camera at them.

Being able to create your own QR codes would be a very useful thing, but perhaps you’re thinking that it must be hard to do. Well, in fact, QR codes are incredibly simple to create. You can even make them using tools like Google Sheets.

If you want to start generating your own QR codes, then learn how to create QR codes in Google Sheets below.

What Are QR Codes?

QR code stands for quick response code. It’s a type of barcode that can be read by machines and has grown in popularity due to the fact that it can hold more information than traditional vertical stripe barcodes. This is because QR codes hold information both in the vertical and horizontal patterns of squares.

QR codes have a wide range of uses, but one of the most popular uses is providing a quick way to link to a specific website or webpage. This is done by scanning the QR code with a smartphone, which will then open the relevant webpage in its browser.

How to Create a QR Code for a Google Sheets Document

If you want to create a QR code to share a Google Sheets document, you can do this quickly and easily through a web browser.

To create a QR code for a Google Sheets document:

1. Sign in to Google Sheets in a browser that offers QR code creation, such as Google Chrome or Brave.
2. Open the Google Sheets document you want to share.
3. Click the Share icon.
   
4. Select Create QR Code.
   
5. A QR code will be generated that you can download.
   
6. Scanning the QR code with a smartphone will open the link to your Google Sheets document.

How to Create QR Codes for Any Link in Google Sheets

If you want to create QR codes for any web link, you can do so within Google Sheets. This is thanks to the Google Charts API, which includes QR code generation features.

You can call this API directly from within a Google Sheets formula and use it to create QR codes for any link you wish.

To create QR codes in Google Sheets:

1. Open a Google Sheets document.
2. Select a cell and type the URL that you want your QR code to link to.
   
3. Select a different cell, and type the following:

=IMAGE("https://chart.googleapis.com/chart?chs=200x200&cht=qr&chl="&ENCODEURL(B2))

4. You may need to edit this to meet your needs. 200×200 is the size of your QR image, and you should change ‘B2’ to the location of the cell containing your URL.
   
5. Press Enter and your QR code will generate.
   
6. You may need to increase the size of your cells to see the QR code in full size. You can do this by dragging the borders of the row and column labels to increase their size.
   
7. Test your QR code by viewing it through the camera app on your smartphone, and you should see a link to your URL.
   
8. Tap the link and the URL you encoded will open on your phone. You can repeat the process as many times as you like.
9. If you want to create multiple QR codes, you can place all the URLs that you want to create QR codes for in one column.
10. Click the corner of the cell containing your first QR code and drag it down.
    
11. You should now have QR codes for all of your links.
    

Sharing Information With Google

Learning how to create QR codes in Google Sheets means that you can create codes for any website you want with just a few clicks. It’s a surprisingly useful feature that you wouldn’t necessarily expect to be able to do in the free spreadsheet application.

There are plenty of other useful Google Sheets tricks you can learn, too. You can learn how to merge sheets in Google Sheets if you need to combine your sheets into one. If you don’t want to combine your sheets, you can learn how to query another sheet in Google Sheets instead.

If you have a list of names with both the first and last name in the same cell, you can learn how to separate names in Google Sheets to make the data easier to sort.