Connect Node.js with Google Sheets: Read & Write Data Easily

🚀 Introduction: Why Integrate Node.js with Google Sheets?

Imagine you're building a simple CRM, attendance system, or order tracker in Node.js and want a Google Sheet to act as a database.

Good news: it's totally doable. In fact, Google Sheets + Node.js is a perfect lightweight backend combo for:

Logging form submissions
Building dashboards
Collecting IoT or webhook data
Non-technical stakeholders accessing structured data

Let’s walk through how to connect Node.js to Google Sheets and:

✅ Write data to a sheet
✅ Read data from a sheet

No rocket science, just APIs, credentials, and a few smart lines of code.

🧠 What You’ll Learn

🔐 Setting up Google Cloud & API Credentials
📦 Installing Node.js packages for Sheets
📤 Sending data to a Google Sheet
📥 Reading values from a Sheet
🛡️ Bonus: Secure your credentials & app

🧰 Prerequisites

Basic knowledge of Node.js & JavaScript
Google account
Node.js installed (v14+)
Familiarity with async/await

🔧 Step 1: Setup Google Sheets API in Google Cloud Console

Visit https://console.cloud.google.com
Create a new project
Enable the Google Sheets API for that project
Go to APIs & Services → Credentials
Click Create Credentials → Service Account
Download the JSON key file
Share your Google Sheet with the service account email like:

[email protected]

✅ Tip: Make sure your Google Sheet is created and shared before testing.

📦 Step 2: Install Required NPM Packages

npm init -y
npm install googleapis@105

🗂️ Step 3: Create Your Project Structure

google-sheets-node/
├── index.js
├── credentials.json  # (your downloaded service key)
└── .gitignore

Add credentials.json to .gitignore for security.

✍️ Step 4: Writing Data to Google Sheets

const { google } = require('googleapis');
const keys = require('./credentials.json');

const auth = new google.auth.GoogleAuth({
  credentials: keys,
  scopes: ['https://www.googleapis.com/auth/spreadsheets'],
});

const sheets = google.sheets({ version: 'v4', auth });

const spreadsheetId = 'your-sheet-id-here'; // from the URL
const range = 'Sheet1!A2:D2'; // row where you want to insert
const values = [['Wasif', '[email protected]', 'Pakistan', 'Developer']];

async function writeSheet() {
  await sheets.spreadsheets.values.update({
    spreadsheetId,
    range,
    valueInputOption: 'RAW',
    requestBody: {
      values,
    },
  });

  console.log('✅ Data written successfully!');
}

writeSheet();

🔍 Step 5: Reading Data from Google Sheets

async function readSheet() {
  const res = await sheets.spreadsheets.values.get({
    spreadsheetId,
    range: 'Sheet1!A2:D10',
  });

  const rows = res.data.values;
  console.log('📥 Fetched rows:', rows);
}

readSheet();

🔐 Bonus: Secure Your App

✅ Don’t expose credentials.json to frontend
✅ Use .env files for keys in production
✅ Limit Sheet permissions to read/write as needed

✅ Final Output

You now have a fully working Node.js script to:

Add data to a spreadsheet (like from a form or DB)
Read spreadsheet contents (to display or log)

📊 Use Cases

Contact form submissions
Expense tracking from IoT devices
Google Sheet as a mini CRM
Inventory logging from webhooks

📁 Example Folder Recap

google-sheets-node/
├── index.js
├── credentials.json
├── .gitignore
└── package.json

🧠 Conclusion

Google Sheets isn’t just a spreadsheet tool — it’s an accessible, cloud-powered database you can tap into using Node.js.

With this simple integration, you’ve unlocked a powerful way to:

Store form or bot data
Build dashboards without a backend DB
Provide non-developers access to structured data

Kashan Iqbal