If you study Mandarin, you probably know what Pinyin is. In Cantonese, Jyutping fulfills a similar role. Dictionaries will show you the Pinyin for individual words, but if you want to quickly convert whole sentences, such as when taking notes during a Chinese lesson, you need better tools.

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Step 1: new spreadsheet

Open new spreadsheet on https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/ . Enter the following column headers: Chinese and Pinyin.

Step 2: choose add-on

In the Add-ons menu, choose Get add-ons, then in the search bar, type mandarin. Install the Mandarin Cantonese Tools add-on by clicking the + Free button.

Step 3: use pinyin conversion function

In your spreadsheet in cell A2, type a Chinese word or sentence, such as 谈生意. In cell B2, type =PINYIN(A2) (don’t forget to start with the = sign). Then press Enter. After a while, you should see the equivalent pinyin.

You can also use =JYUTPING(A2) if you are learning Cantonese.

Step 4: extend the formula to other rows

Drag the lower right hand square while on cell B2 to extend the formula to subsequent rows.

Done ! You can now quickly convert lots of chinese words or sentence to pinyin, which is particularly useful when taking notes during a Chinese lesson, especially if you’re going to convert those notes to flashcards. You can directly export the result to CSV and import into Anki.

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This addon makes use of the following open source library: https://github.com/lucwastiaux/python-pinyin-jyutping-sentence