Pull Historical Cryptocurrency Data into Google Sheets in Under 2 Minutes

4 min readNov 21, 2017

A decade ago, financial data (namely stocks, options, etc.) was silo’d and difficult to get.

The common route was to pay an inordinate one-time or monthly sum to a data provider, and in turn you would be given access to their database.

These fees could be in excess of thousands of dollars, and were completely out of reach to the common investor.

The cryptocurrency industry is bucking this trend. Through the use of APIs, the ability to get free, quality data is significantly easier than it used to be.

However…

If you aren’t a developer, pulling data can be challenging

What if you don’t know how to use APIs?

These APIs are tailored for developers, so non-programmers have a more difficult time in getting historical data into the apps they love.

An entire industry of super-smart analysts who are unable to code exists, and until now the tools in the cryptocurrency industry have not caught up with the demand.

The Spreadstreet Google Sheets Add-in

We have created a super simple Google Sheets add-in that makes it painlessly simple to download data directly into a spreadsheet. We show you how to do it step by step in this article.

How to Implement

Step 1: Download the pre-configured template

Estimated time: 10 seconds

Step 2: Install the Spreadstreet Google Sheets add-in

You have two options to install the add-in:

Click here. In the top right of the frame, click “Install.” The add-in will now be installed into Google Sheets
From within the template, click the link located in row 7. This will bring up the frame, and in the top right click “Install.” The add-in will now be installed into Google Sheets

Estimated time: 30 seconds

Step 3: Choose symbol, time frame, and section

For this example, we are going to pull historical 1-minute data for the Bitcoin-US Dollar pairing.

In B24, choose “tBTCUSD” (this is pulling from the Bitfinex API, and this is how they recognize pairings in their API)
In C24, choose “1m”. Make sure that you pull 1m and not 1M, as 1M is monthly data
In D24, choose “hist.” If you choose “last” you would only pull in the most recent datapoint

Estimated time: 30 seconds

Using the =SS() Function

The Spreadstreet add-in has a nifty, built-in function that can be used for any of the connected endpoints within the program. In our template, this function pulls in the price history in cell D1 on the “Data” tab.

The function consists of three parts:

The endpoint you are pulling
The required parameters
The optional parameters

In this example, we are using the tickers-bitfinex endpoint. For a current list of all endpoints, click here.

The only required parameter here is the symbol, aka tBTCUSD.

The only optional parameter is headers. Specifying true will pull in the headers, and false will omit the headers.

Each endpoint has it’s own specific required and optional parameters, but every example will include at least the API Endpoint, and the option to pull in headers.