How to analyze Google reviews in Excel

Once a business's Google reviews are in Excel, a couple of pivot tables answer most of the questions people ask: how ratings are split, whether reviews are speeding up or slowing down, and whether the average is improving. Here's the whole thing, start to finish.

1. Get the reviews into Excel

1. Get Maps Reviews Exporter. It's free and needs no account.
2. Open the business on Google Maps, click the extension, click Collect reviews, then Export CSV.
3. Double-click the CSV to open it in Excel. Non-English text and emoji come through correctly, because the file is saved as UTF-8 with a byte order mark, which Excel recognizes.

2. Turn it into a table

Click any cell, press Ctrl+T (Cmd+T on a Mac) and confirm that the table has headers. Tables make filtering, sorting and pivot tables much easier, and they grow automatically if you paste in more rows later.

Useful columns: rating (I), date_estimated (K), text (M) and owner_response (Q).

3. Add two helper columns

At the end of the table, add:

• month: =TEXT([@date_estimated],"yyyy-mm")
• replied: =IF([@owner_response]="","no","yes")

4. Pivot table: star rating split

Insert → PivotTable → New worksheet. Drag rating to Rows and rating again to Values, then set Values to Count. Insert a bar chart from it. A healthy business usually has most reviews at 5 stars and a small tail at 1 star; a big bump at 1 star is the first red flag.

5. Pivot table: trend by month

Make a second pivot table with month in Rows, then add rating to Values twice: once as Count (reviews per month) and once as Average (average rating per month). A line chart of the average over the last 12 months shows at a glance whether things are getting better or worse.

The date_estimated column is calculated from Google's "3 months ago" style dates, so recent months are precise and older reviews are approximate. That's fine for spotting trends.

6. Reply rate

A third pivot with replied in Rows and Count of rating in Values shows how many reviews got an owner reply. Add rating as a column field to see whether the owner answers bad reviews or only thanks the good ones.

7. Read the worst reviews

Back in the table, filter rating to 1 and 2 and sort by date, newest first. Reading the 20 most recent bad reviews usually tells you more than any chart.

Free vs Pro

Free exports 50 reviews per place, enough to try every step above. Pro ($24.99 once, no subscription) exports every review, adds JSON export and star and keyword filters, and builds the monthly average and reply-rate summary for you inside the extension.

Updated 2026-10-21.