Key Takeaways
- Google Sheets updates focus on productivity, AI integration, and performance enhancements.
- Chrome dev group collaboration optimizes Sheets speed for formula execution, formatting, and pivot tables.
- New features: Gemini side panel, purpose-built templates, automatic formatting, conditional notifications.
Yesterday, Microsoft detailed all the features it had added to Excel during June 2024, and while the change log wasn’t huge, it contained several enhancements to entice existing and potential customers. Now, right on cue, Google has announced a major update for Sheets, its web-based spreadsheet software. The update focuses on productivity improvements, along with the integration of AI capabilities.
What productivity enhancements are available in Google Sheets?
The Google Sheets team has collaborated with the Chrome development group to optimize the performance of Sheets in Google Chrome and Microsoft Edge. Sheets now leverages the WasmGC library, which doubles the calculation speed through faster code execution. Users will notice performance benefits when running formulas, using conditional formatting, and creating pivot tables. These enhancements are also headed to Safari and Firefox at a later date, and right now, the team is also working on enhancing filtering and copy-paste performance, along with reducing the load time for Sheets initialization.
Talking about initialization of Sheets, you can now organize your data more easily. The Gemini side panel can be utilized to summarize and analyze your content. In addition, it can also leverage data from your emails and documents to build a spreadsheet that is contextually relevant, along with providing an automatic summary. Customers can also benefit from purpose-built templates for tables to get started on organizing their content.
What about formatting and alerts?
Google has some good news on these fronts too. The company has launched a new tables feature that automatically formats and structures your data with color coding, column types, drop-down menus, and more. Additionally, you can also configure conditional notifications so that email alerts are sent to relevant users based on certain criteria and thresholds. The company has emphasized that moving forward, it plans to leverage the power of AI to further improve Sheets, offering a more streamlined and productive experience for its customers.