I sold my first digital product 🥳

and it had nothing to do with science. 😁

Hellooo!

I woke up to this email and honestly, it made my whole morning 👇

A special welcome to new joiners of this newsletter. 🤗
My name is Pranoti and I’m the founder of The Science Talk.
My mission is to empower and enable scientists to share their stories in digital spaces with confidence and ease. 🧡

**So what’s the product?**It’s a step-by-step guide to connect Claude Desktop to Google Sheets using an MCP server.

**Why & how did I do it?**I’ve been using spreadsheets since forever for my work and so I was very happy to see Google Drive in the Claude connectors list. But I quickly realised the integration is limited to Google Docs. For sheets, I was stuck manually copy-pasting the data or downloading CSVs → upload to Claude. Way too much back-and-forth for the current “age of AI”. There had to be a better way.

Enter 🥁MCP (Model Context Protocol)🥁  — an open-source standard created by Anthropic that lets AI models securely connect to external tools, databases, and files. Think of it as a universal plug-and-play connector.

Now…I’m not a developer. I’m not a coder. But I’m resourceful and I know how to get things done. 🤪

After 4 hours of back-and-forth with Claude — including calm-down breaks when the hallucinations got on my nerves — I managed to successfully connect Claude to my Google Sheets.

Real life impactI can now read, write, and update any Google Sheet directly from Claude. No CSV exports, no manual data entry.

This saves me a huge amount of cognitive load and I highly recommend integrating Claude (or whichever AI tool you’re using) into your workflows.

If you want to save yourself those 4 hours, you can grab my step-by-step guide Claude Connected to Google Sheets Using MCP for €12.

How are you integrating AI into your existing workflows? Reply to this email and share your story!

Cheers,
Pranoti

PS: I’m writing this from a train to the Netherlands, heading to NWO NAC — the Dutch Earth and Environmental Sciences Conference. It’s a little outside my usual materials and nanoscience bubble, but I’m genuinely excited to be around scientists talking passionately about their research, whatever the field. More on that next week!

If, apart from my email, you also like some proposal writing support, I think you’ll be happy about:

1. Impact strategy for research proposalswhere I work with principal investigators who want professional science communication that matches the ambition and budget of their grant proposal. More details are on my website.
2. ERC Synergy Guidance — 14th April, 2pm CEST. I’ll share some of my secrets about fleshing out a winning outreach work package in your proposal. Save your spot!

What’s inside:

✅ Complete OAuth 2.0 setup

✅ Copy-paste configuration

✅ 5 Claude prompts to use the moment you’re connected

✅ 7 common errors with exact fixes

✅ Security checklist to keep your credentials safe