Post number 8 of “The Practical Google Sheets Guide”

These blog posts are part of research I’m doing for a potential new book, hopefully allowing me to further my love for spreadsheets. Theses posts are hoping to provide a practical cookbook of examples to the reader and allow me to learn what people are interested in and how to approach different subjects working with Google Sheets.

Introduction

I’ve been doing these Google Sheets posts for a month or so now, but so far they have been targeted to users who are existing Google Sheets users. This post is for anyone that is completely brand new to Google Sheets and needs a quick and dirty introduction just to get you started as quickly as possible.

If you have never used Google Sheets before, thats all good, we can start from the beginning here. If you know Microsoft Excel, well, Google Sheets is similar, offering a free web-based spreadsheet application, which is, of course developed by Google. It allows users to create, edit and share spreadsheets online, making it easy to collaborate in real time with other users. Google Sheets shares a lot of similar features to Excel, allowing users to include formulas, charts, pivot tables and conditional formatting. You can also import and export data from different formats including .xlsx, which means you can work directly with Excel data.

What You Need To Know To Get This Done?

To go through this basic tutorial on working with Google Sheets, you will need a computer or laptop with an internet connection and a recent version of a web browser like Chrome. You will also need a Google account, which a lot of people already have, but if you don’t, signing up for a free account with Google is easy. Firstly, go to the following link:
https://accounts.google.com/

If you don’t have a login for a Google account, you can do the following:

• Click on Create account
• Select the type of account you want to create, either “For my personal use”, “For my child” or “For my work or for business”
• Then click on the Create button and follow the prompts to create your account with Google.

Everything we are doing in the following post, will be very basic and definitely no require a paid Google account.

Creating A Blank(new) Spreadsheet
Once you have an account with Google, you can start to use Google Sheets. There are a few ways you can create a new spreadsheet, which we will cover in the following:

Starting A New Google Sheet from the spreadsheets web page

1. Go to docs.google.com/spreadsheets.
2. Click Blank spreadsheet.

Starting A New Google Sheet In A Browser Tab:

1. Type https://sheets.new/ into your browser

Starting a New Google Sheet From An Existing Google Sheet

1. With Google Sheets open click on File from the top menu
2. Click on New and select Spreadsheet to create a new blank sheet

Start A New Google Sheet From Google Drive web page

1. Go to drive.google.com.
2. From the left menu, click New, and then select Google Sheets.
3. Select Blank spreadsheet

Now that we have a new Google Sheet open and ready in our browser, it’s time to familiarise ourselves with the user interface

Familiarising Yourself with the Interface

We have numbered the different sections of the google sheets interface to provide you with a description

1. Sheet Title - Here you can provide the sheet with a descriptive title, so you know what information it stores
2. Menu Bar - Located at the very top (File, Edit, View, Insert, Format, Data, Tools, Extensions, Help), and provides access to all features and settings.
3. Share Button - Lets you share the sheet with others and manage permissions.
4. Toolbar - Directly below the menu bar and contains quick-access icons for common actions (undo, redo, print, formatting, text alignment, font size, etc.).
5. Name Box - Displays the address of the active cell (e.g., A1) and allows you to quickly jump to a specific cell.
6. Formula Bar - Below the toolbar and shows the contents of the selected cell and allows you to enter or edit formulas and data.
7. Column and Row Headers - Columns: Letters at the top of the grid. Rows: Numbers on the left side of the grid. Clicking these selects entire columns or rows.
8. Grid Of Cells - The main area where you enter and view data and is organised into columns (labelled A, B, C, etc.) and rows (numbered 1, 2, 3, etc.). Each box is a cell, identified by its column letter and row number (e.g., A1).
9. Sheets Tab - At the bottom of the window with each tab representing a different sheet within your spreadsheet file. You can add, rename, move, or delete sheets here.

Now we know the basics of our interface, we can now start adding data into our new Google Sheet, to start to see how things really work.

Name Your Spreadsheet

If you remember from the section above and the image of our interface, you can see number 1, the sheet title of our new spreadsheet is currently listed as “Untitled spreadsheet”. If you click on the work “Untitled spreadsheet” you will see your cursor move into that area of the interface and you can now change the title to whatever you want. It is usually best to give it a meaningful name, and something you will be able to easily recognise at a later date.

Navigate the Spreadsheet

When you open a new spreadsheet in Google Sheets, the cell at the top left of the screen called A1 will be active. The active cell means that if you start typing, everything you type will be entered into that cell. You have probably already tried that, you can navigate around the spreadsheet using your mouse by clicking in the specific cell you want to, or by moving your arrow keys to the specific cell.

Google Sheets has 26 columns named A to Z at the top of the work area, and rows numbered from 1 to 1000 on the left side of the screen. These can be extended but, we can worry about that at a later time.

When we refer to our cells, we refer to its column and row value combined. For example the very first is A1, the second cell to the right will be B1, and so on.

Enter Data into Cells

Simply click on the cell you want to enter date into and start typing. Once you enter a word or a number, press the Enter(return) key and the data you entered in the top left cell will be saved and you will be moved to the next cell below. Instead, if you press the Tab key, your data will also be saved, but you will be moved one cell to the right.

Using The Fill Handle

The image below gives an example on how to use the fill handle.

1. Enter a word in the cell A1, in our example, we have added the word “Hive”
2. The bottom right corner of the cell, when you use your mouse will turn into a cross. We have highlighted this with an arrow in the image below
3. Click your mouse button and drag the fill handle either across to the side or down, and the word in your cell will be copied across.

You can also use this with numbers, dates and formulas, but we will look more at that later.

Adding Data With Copy and Paste

There are a few different ways you can copy and paste data from one cell to another, and by using these techniques, can speed up the time it takes to add your data.

1. We can continue with our example, select the cell you want to copy and click on “Copy” from the Edit menu.
2. Move to the cell or highlight a range of cells you want to copy to, then select “Paste” from the Edit menu, as we have in the image below.
   

Add Data With Functions and Formulas

One of the major selling points of spreadsheets are functions and formulas. Using functions and formulas can allow you to collate data, transform the values in your spreadsheet and add data quickly to our sheet. There is no need to go too far into depth into formulas and functions at this point in time, but just know that a formula always begins with the equals sign(=) and then usually uses a function or set of functions to perform some task or set of tasks in your spreadsheet.

Let’s use some helpful functions to add some data into our sheet.

1. Move to cell B2 on our sheet

2. Enter the following formula into the cell exactly as it is written below and then press Enter(return)
   =RANDARRAY(1 ,4)

   The above formula uses the RANDARRAY function create a random number from 0 - 1, over the next 4 cells(your values will look different to the example below)

3. Now move to cell B3 on our sheet

4. Enter the following formula in the cell, exactly as it is written below, and then press Enter(return)
   =SEQUENCE(12,1,-1)
   The above formula uses the SEQUENCE function to create values starting from -1, for the next 12 cells, increasing the value by 1 each time.
   

NOTE: A little more advanced features of Google Sheets also allows you to import data from another spreadsheet using a formula, import data from other websites, and import Excel and CSV data directly into your sheet.

All the functions mentioned can be found at the following reference page, in case you need to double check how the function works:
@strava2hive/my-google-sheets-function-reference

Formatting Cells

Formatting our cells and data allows us to change the way the data and information is presented. We can highlight the data and use the toolbar to change the font, colour, alignment and format.

We can completely change the way our spreadsheet looks. Move back into our example sheet and we will format the top row of cells as we have in the image below:

1. Use your mouse to highlight the top four cells from A1 to D1
2. Start by increasing the font size by going to the toolbar and clicking on the plus sign(+) next to the font size to increase it to 12.
3. Then click on the Bold icon, which looks like the letter B to make our text bold.
4. Change the fill colour of the cells by clicking on the icon in the toolbar that looks like a small paint can. Click on it and select a shade of green.
5. Lastly, we can centre the text in the cells, click on the Align icon, which looks like a stack of horizontal lines. Click on the icon and select centre.
   

Add or Delete Rows and Columns

By right clicking on the row number on the left of the screen or the column letter at the top of the screen, you can insert or remove rows or columns.

Share and Collaborate

One of the strong points of Google Sheets is the ability to share and collaborate with other users. Simply click the “Share” button in the top right to invite others to view or edit your sheet.

Conclusion

If you are new to using Google Sheets, you’ve done some good work in a short amount of time. We have shown you how to create a new sheet from a number of different sources and we went through the major parts of the Google Sheets interface and explained there function. You should now be able to navigate your sheets and give them a name, you should now also be familiar with adding basic data to your sheet, copying and pasting, and using basic formulas to add data to your sheet. Finally, we showed you how to change the formatting and look of the cells, adding and deleting rows and then the basics of sharing your sheet.

This is has been a very quick introduction to Google Sheets, now you are familiar with the basics, you should easily be able to go one with some of our more involved tutorials and guides.

Some of our earlier posts include:

• Calculating Total Daily Energy Expenditure
• Habit Tracking In Google Sheets

About The Author

The post is written by Vincent Sesto, a Aussie Software Engineer, living and working in Auckland, New Zealand. If you are interested in my authors page on Amazon, feel free to checked it out at the following link:
https://us.amazon.com/stores/author/B073R3VW2G