How to Use SQL Labels in Google Sheets

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One SQL function that we can use to further improve our data analysis is the label clause. The label clause is used to, well, add a label on a column of data. The query follows the following format:

label column1_id “label_name1”, column2_id “label_name2”

... And so on, separating each pair by a comma. 

Add column header using label clause

We can use the label clause to add column headers to the data without modifying the original sheet. For example, if we have this source data:

Using the following query...

label A 'State Name', B 'Year Recorded', C 'Language', D 'Original Word', E 'Notes'

... place it in Google Sheets' QUERY function with the format...

=query([range],"[SQL query]'")

... we get the following result:

Replace column header using label clause

The same query can be used to replace existing column headers in your new copy of the sheet. If we have the following sheet… 

And, we want to replace the headers with different names (from state name to state, from year first attested in original language to year, from language of origin to language, from word in original language to word, and from meaning and notes to notes), we can set the following query:

label A 'state', B 'year', C 'language', D 'word', E 'notes'

With this, we'll have to place it in Google Sheets' QUERY function with the format:

=query([range],"[SQL query]'")

And the result looks like this:

Can we use the label string as a pointer in queries?

You might have noticed that we use the column letter to point to specific columns in all our queries. Unfortunately, we cannot use the label string as a pointer in writing queries. 

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