Google Sheets is a spreadsheet program offered by Google as part of the Google Workspace and the free office suite included in the Google Drive service.
Its wide usage all around the world makes it the second most used spreadsheet program after Microsoft Excel.
What is Google Sheets?
Google Sheets is Google’s alternative to Microsoft Excel. It’s a spreadsheets program included in the office suite every user gets for free with a Gmail account. You can find it in the Google Drive space of your account.
First released in 2006, this light, free, and easy-to-use software is now extensively used by young users and young companies as part of their day-to-day workflow.
Key points/features
The main point of Google Sheets is its focus on collaborative work, allowing teams to share a spreadsheet and work on it even simultaneously. This is a huge time saver over having to share a file in a more traditional way. Now you can just share a link, and work together in real-time.
It’s mainly an online tool, but with the use of the Chrome browser or the Android and IOS apps, you can do some offline editing too.
While probably not being as complete as Microsoft Excel from the point of view of functions and options, it’s a complete package for most users. It also integrates functions like GOOGLETRANSLATE and GOOGLEFINANCE to get access to data from other services within a google sheet.
Google Sheets and Technology Accent
While not being in any way related or affiliated with Google or Alphabet Inc, we are huge fans of the Google environment, so we have a lot published about this powerful platform.
Tips to know while working on your Google Sheet
On this page, you will find some of our tips, usually with a link to a more in-depth article if you want to go into detail. We recommend visiting the in-depth articles for the arguments you want to explore, as they will contain more and more info on that topic.
Add a new line or a line break in a cell
Sometimes your column is too tight for your long cell content. Fortunately, you can insert a line break and split your text into a new line. You have to just use the right shortcut: Alt + Enter or Ctrl + Enter for windows, or Option + Enter or Command + Enter on mac.
You can find more info on the page dedicated to adding a new line.
Moving around a spreadsheet without using the mouse
Navigation without using a mouse is always a great thing to learn when you extensively use a program. It’s an easy way to increase productivity as you save time by avoiding reaching the mouse every time to move around. The go to cell shortcut is F5, but it’s often disabled by default.
We discussed how to unlock the go to cell function together with other very handy shortcuts to quickly move around your spreadsheet in the article dedicated to how to go to a cell.
Change row height or column width
By default, Google sheets auto-resizes row height, but there are some times you need to get a custom row height. There are various options when it comes to resizing rows or columns. We detailed them in our article about changing row height.
Underline and remove underline on text inside a cell
Underlining is a great way to emphasize text, and while spreadsheets are mostly for data storage and analysis, we have a whole article about underlining for different needs and situations.
Add a strikethrough to a cell’s content
As previously said, Google Sheets is not a word processing software, but it has the standard text formatting options like strikethrough. In addition, you can use conditional formatting to apply formatting to your cells based on a condition you with as a formula.
We discussed in depth about adding the strikethrough formatting both manually and through the conditional formatting menu in the article about strikethrough.
Merging cells without losing data in them
Merging cells is mostly a visual feature, but when you merge two or more cells, the software keeps only the first cell’s content, erasing all the data on the other cells you’re merging. We discussed some solutions to transfer all the data to the new merged cell in our article about merging cells.
Combine first and last name
Sometimes, you have or get a file with separate columns for first and last name, and you want to get them together into a Full Name column. This is pretty easy once you know how to use the Ampersand operator, the CONCATENATE function, or some other solutions we discussed in the article dedicated to combining first and last name.
Using the LOOKUP function
The LOOKUP function is a great tool when you need to automatically search through a data range on a table. There are, however, some restrictions you should be aware of, and we detailed them in our article about using the LOOKUP function.
Locking and unlocking cells
We said that one of the major strengths of google sheets is that it makes it easy to work together with other people on a single shared spreadsheet. It saves you the hassle of sending emails back and forth, waiting for others to make their work before being able to work on it again. This comes to a cost: someone in the team could modify some data he shouldn’t edit. So on a Google Sheet, you can lock a cell, a range, or even an entire table, so only you (or some people you give permission to) can edit.
Locking a cell is easy and you can do it with the right-click contextual menu, the detailed procedure to both lock and unlock is in our article about how to lock and unlock cells.
Transposing rows to columns and columns to rows
There are some situations where you find yourself thinking: what if I switch this table’s rows into columns? That’s what the TRANSPOSE functions are used for. The TRANSPOSE function works with a Range, so you don’t have to transpose the whole spreadsheet.
You can read it in more detail in the article about the TRANSPOSE function.
Adding leading zeros to a numeric value
Google Sheets is a spreadsheet tool, so it’s made to work with data and numbers. As we all know, a zero before a number is worth nothing from a mathematical point of view, so Google sheets automatically delete leading zeros in a number. However, there are situations where you want a leading zero to be preserved, for aesthetic reasons, or because you’re dealing with something like an employee id, a zipcode, or something similar.
Knowing how to deal with these situations is a great time-saver, increasing overall productivity. So you maybe want to read our article about dealing with leading zeros.