Converting Chinese Characters to Pinyin/Jyutping on Google Sheets: now with more functionality

LucW
3 min readSep 12, 2019

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Batch mode, tone numbers, spaces between syllables now supported.

Please read https://medium.com/@lucw/converting-chinese-characters-to-pinyin-or-jyutping-on-google-sheets-eb12cca669cb to install the addon. This article focuses on the new functionality.

Support my work on this add-on

Batch Mode

You can now pass a range of cells or a whole column to the PINYIN() / JYUTPING() fuctions, for example:

  • PINYIN(A1:A20) this will convert cells A1 through A20
  • PINYIN(A:A) this will convert any chinese text present in column A. It will keep on converting as you add new rows in column A. Make sure you have no existing text in the target column.
  • PINYIN(A3:A) this will convert any chinese text present in column A, starting at row 3. It will keep on converting as you add new rows in column A. Make sure you have no existing text in the target column. (you may need to delete existing text)
using batch mode with the PINYIN function
Result of using batch mode
for more convenience, you can convert the whole column with PINYIN(A:A) or JYUTPING(A:A)

Tone Numbers

If you don’t want diacritics (accented characters), you can enable tone numbers. In Pinyin, diacritics are an accepted practice, but in Jyutping they are more rare. You can now choose by passing TRUE/FALSE as the second parameter of the PINYIN/JYUTPING functions.

enabling tone numbers on the PINYIN function
Result of using tone numbers on the PINYIN function

Spaces between syllables

Some people prefer spaces between each syllable, to more easily distinguish them. This is now possible again, with the third parameter to PINYIN/JYUTPING.

Specifying spaces between syllables with the PINYIN/JYUTPING functions
Result after specifying both tone numbers and spaces

That’s it ! Hope you enjoy using the addon. The addon makes use of the opensource python library here: https://github.com/lucwastiaux/python-pinyin-jyutping-sentence

Follow me on Patreon to receive updates about new functionality: https://www.patreon.com/lucw

Let me know if you have any questions !

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