Google Sheets top tips and tricks | ITPro
The Workspace answer to Excel is chock full of impressive features – here's how to get the most out of them for your business. Despite its reputation as Microsoft Excel's younger, less heavy-duty sibling, Google Sheets has much to offer and your team's productivity can be boosted by knowing the top tips and tricks. Designed in the style of other Google Workspace products, Sheets has a clean and accessible layout complete with the typical dropdown menus and text formatting options set atop the main table screen. Don't let this seemingly simple setup fool you though. Under the hood, Sheets is a powerful tool that can be used to house reams of company data or to create plans for complex projects.
Optimizing Google Sheets with Google Forms
While all the products across the Google Workspace suite are designed to work with one another, certain tools work particularly well when paired. An example of this is Google Sheets and Google Forms. Forms allow users to create their own questionnaires for others to fill out, and Sheets is built so that responses from those forms can be inputted directly into spreadsheets. To use this feature, navigate to the dropdown 'Tools' menu in Google Sheets.
Enhancing User Experience with Add-ons
Google integrates the Google Workspace Marketplace into its productivity suite, a marketplace devoted to plugins designed to enhance user experience and workflow within platforms like Sheets or Docs. By clicking on the extensions tab and selecting the 'Add-ons' button from the drop-down menu, users are taken to the marketplace page where they can download apps from third-party developers approved by Google. One popular add-on is Sheetgo, which allows users to easily connect sheets, Excel files, and CSV files to transfer, filter, split, and merge data.
Utilizing Filters and Tables in Google Sheets
When using Google Sheets as a project planner, it can be helpful to use the platform's filter tool. Filters can be created by right-clicking on a cell, or a range of cells, and selecting the 'create a filter' option. Another useful feature is converting data into tables within Sheets projects, which can help users better maintain information. Tables are useful for project tracking, event planning, inventory management, or any situation in which data must be compartmentalized.
Advanced Data Organization with Table Views and Google Gemini
Using the 'table views' function in Sheets can be useful to locate data without impacting others collaborating on the sheet. Views can reveal or hide specific rows or apply other configurations to manage data. Google's flagship AI tool, Google Gemini, can be used in Google Sheets to organize data with ease. Gemini can help analyze data and provide insights based on prompts entered by users.
Keeping Data Clean and Error-Free
When working with data in sheets, there are a few handy tricks to know that can help keep data clean and well-maintained, avoiding the creation of erroneous data or duplicated data in problematic quantities. Sheets can be configured to limit data-entry choices and remove duplicate data to ensure data accuracy.
