Big Changes Mean Big Information in Google Sheets

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Last year, Google launched "Explore" in Sheets to help users easily decipher their data using the power of machine learning, and since then Google has added even more ways for users to intelligently visualize and share their company data. Today, Google announced additional features to Google Sheets to help businesses make better use of their data, from machine learning-powered pivot tables and formula suggestions to even more flexible ways to help them analyze the business data.

When it comes to data in spreadsheets, deciphering meaningful insights can be a challenge whether you’re a spreadsheet guru or data analytics pro. But thanks to advances in the cloud and artificial intelligence, these new Google Sheets features can instantly uncover insights and empower everyone in your organization—not just those with technical or analytics backgrounds—to make more informed decisions.

Easier Pivot Tables Provide Faster Insights

Many teams rely on pivot tables to summarize massive data sets and find useful patterns; but creating pivot tables manually can be challenging. But now, if your data is organized in a spreadsheet, Google Sheets can intelligently suggest a pivot table for you.

Within the Explore pane, users can also ask questions of the data using everyday language (via natural language processing) and then have the answer returned as a pivot table. For example, type a question like, “what is the sum of revenue by salesperson?” Another example might be, “how much revenue does each product category generate?” In response to these questions, Google Sheets will help you identify the right pivot table analysis for each query.

In addition, if you want to create a pivot table from scratch, Google Sheets can suggest a number of relevant tables in the pivot table editor to help users summarize their data faster.

Suggested Formulas Provide Quicker Answers

Spreadsheet users commonly make use of basic spreadsheet formulas like =SUM or =AVERAGE for data analysis, but it takes time to make sure all these formula inputs are correct. Starting today, users may notice that Google Sheets will pop-up suggestions when they type “=” (an equal sign) into a cell.

Using machine intelligence, Google Sheets provides full formula suggestions to users based on contextual clues from their spreadsheet data. Google designed this new functionality to help users save time and get intuitive answers quickly.

Even More Features in Google Sheets

Google has also added more features to make Sheets even better for data analysis:  

  • Check out a refreshed UI for pivot tables in Sheets including customizable headings for rows and columns.
  • View more informative data with new pivot table features, when users create a pivot table, they can “show values as a % of totals” to see summarized values as a fraction of grand totals. Once users have a table, they can right-click on a cell to “view details” or even combine pivot table groups to aggregate data the way they need it. Google has also added new format options, like repeated row labels, to give users more fine-tuned control of how to present their summarized data.
  • Create and edit waterfall charts. Waterfall charts are good for visualizing sequential changes in data, if you want to see the incremental breakdown of last year’s revenue month-by-month. Select Insert > Chart > Chart type picker and then choose “waterfall.”
  • Quickly import or paste fixed-width formatted data files. Sheets will now automatically split up the data into columns for you without needing a delimiter (for example, commas between data).

These new Google Sheets features will be rolling out soon. To learn more about how G Suite can help your business uncover valuable insights and speed up efficiencies, visit the Google Suite website.