These are simple spreadsheet hacks you might not know about. Simple interface tricks that knowing about will make your spreadsheet life better.
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Hacks You Might Not Know
About this Tutorial
Video Transcript
00:00 prepare yourself for a guided tour of Google Sheets. This is a brand new sheet. I haven't done anything except name it so far.
00:07 And I wanted to give you a tour of things that are right in front of your face. These are super easy hacks that you might not know exist in Google Sheets, or you might know some, you might not know it all.
00:19 So I wanted to give you a little bit of a tour share with you sort of things you can do right away.
00:23 And that is going to make your life so much easier in Google Sheets. So the very first thing which is way bigger now in a Google Sheets just change their interface a little bit.
00:33 There's this little dot when you're focused on a cell, there's this little dot on the right hand corner, it used to be much smaller.
00:41 It's much bigger now. And your cursor will change from a cursor like a pointer. Sometimes it'll change to a plus sign.
00:50 This is super important. Because if I do like task one, and I do task two, and I want to keep naming, numbering these, I can click and I can drag this all the way down.
01:00 And I can drag this all the way down. And it'll continue iterating, it'll continue adding this number. If I do January February, if I can spell it right, I select them both, it will keep adding, even going past the year.
01:20 There you go. Oh, do Monday. I can probably do Monday. I only think I have to do one. There you go.
01:25 I only have to do one and it knows what to do. The beauty of this is that it does go sideways as well.
01:33 So you can create really simple headers, really fast. You can even do day one. Day. Two and pull them to the right and it'll just add them.
01:48 What I like to do as well is if you have a header or if you have any sort of data that you've put here and you're like, oh, I'm gonna copy paste this over here and I need to copy paste this over here for some reason.
02:01 And I need to go back and delete it. You can actually just move the entire cell. If you hover over the edge of the cell with the, and then the pointer will change into a hand and you click and you drag it, you don't have to copy paste or cut it or anything like that.
02:20 You can actually just move the entire cell. Move the entire thing. You can even move the entire column, or part of the column.
02:28 Actually, you can always move the column here. That's sort of the next thing I'll show you up here in the columns.
02:33 You can just move columns. You can just click on A, B, or C. Super simple, right? You might know this already.
02:40 Just clicking on, an A, B, C, or D will select the entire column. And then the pointer will move to a hand, and you can move it over.
02:49 You can also, if you're like, hey, I need to add a column here, you can insert one column to left or right.
02:57 But also, if you select any number of columns above one, and you do that. It'll insert two or the number of columns that you have selected.
03:06 So this is super simple to do if you're like, I need another couple of extra columns. Or you're like, I want 26 more columns.
03:13 Just select all 26 columns and then you can copy to the left or the right. And it'll insert to the left and right another 26 columns.
03:25 Same for rows. You can just click on the number here, and it'll change to a hand. You can move the rows around.
03:37 And you can also increase the size of the columns and rows If you go to the numbers or between the letters on this grid, you can click there and it will increase the size of the row here.
03:51 It will increase the size of the column here. But a little trick is if you select two columns and you go to where you would normally click and you can click and you can click and you can click here and it will increase the size drag, if you double click, it will collapse to the maximum needed space,
04:10 the column. So if I end up doing task one, two, three here, see how the, there's a little bit extra over overloading.
04:19 I go back up here and I double click, it will automatically. I automatically get that for me to the exact size I want.
04:28 And if I select more than one or two rows and I change the size, it will change the size of all of them.
04:36 Same with column. If I change the size of the rows or columns, it will change all of them. All of the size of the rows.
04:43 But this is sort of a little trick that I like to do is sometimes our data looks messy in columns like this where the column size is different.
04:52 So I'll go ahead and select all the columns and I'll just make them all the same size. Makes our data look a little bit cleaner or at least the structure of the sheet look a little bit cleaner.
05:02 And then I'll, I'll also go down the entire all rows and I'll just make that super clean all the same.
05:09 You can select the entire sheet, all rows and all columns by clicking right here in this sort of empty box between the A and the one.
05:18 You can click on the first one. We'll see here. A1. But right there between A1. A and one on the left side of A and the top side of one, you could select every single cell.
05:32 Another thing you can do is just in case your formulas get very big or have multiple lines, you can increase the size of the formula bar.
05:42 You can all. Oh. So actually go up here and show an unshow or hide the formula bar completely. So those are two separate hacks and it doesn't do command Z if they actually go back up here show formula bar again.
05:55 But this is super helpful in case you want to add a new line in the middle of a cell. So I'm going to do Command Enter to have a new line.
06:05 And maybe I want February here. Maybe I have a little bit of option 8 here. I'm going to add a little bullet point, option 8 here.
06:13 And I'm going to do Command Enter on a Mac, option 8 for the bullet point. Maybe I want all January, February, and March here.
06:21 But look at this formula. Bar. If the formula bar was normal, I wouldn't see that January. I wouldn't see beyond January.
06:29 So sometimes if we have more than one line in our formula, we want to show it all. Also in or a space or a comma or a period.
06:46 But I can also have command enter and do a new line. So I do a new line of B1 colon B5.
06:59 And I'm joining those all here. But if my formula bar. Is normal, I will only see the top which is the join literally.
07:07 So sometimes I like to show off the whole entire formula here, especially when I'm using complex formulas, formula combinations. And if you want to learn more formula combinations, make sure to check out bettersheets.co.
07:20 Slash topics slash formula. So go just to bettersheets.co. Topics and there'll be one topic there all about formula combinations. You'll see really cool stuff there and it can get pretty complex.
07:32 It can have a lot of formulas wrapped around each other there. So just like you can hide the formula bar you can also hide this menu bar.
07:44 Clicking this up chevron arrow here and that hides the menus, all those menus up there. Makes it a lot easier sometimes to see more data in your sheet.
07:56 I'm sort of working through some interesting things. You can always name ranges if you have like A1 to C1 here.
08:03 Here, you can go up to this name box, command J, it looks like to auto focus it. But you can also just click it and you can say, you know, up all the above.
08:16 Oh, I need to all the above. Very, it needs to be all one word. And now you have named range, and you can say equals all the above.
08:28 And there we go. We got all the above. What's interesting, too, is if we go down to the bottom right corner near my face high, we see the Explorer has Open Explorer and it's green.
08:43 No data here it is grayed out we don't have anything to explore but if we have some interesting we have things here we can go down to the bottom and it will have a green explore this explore is fantastic it's AI powered it shows you pretty simple little charts little insights that you can do right away
09:06 and you can ask about this data right here. How many Mondays are there? Sorry, we couldn't understand any question. Count and they tell you what kind of things they can do.
09:20 Count for row one of Monday. Sorry, we couldn't. Okay, I don't use this explorer very often. I do like it for its charts.
09:30 The very quick simple charts just to see some interesting data there. But let me share with you what I feel like is the most interesting hack that you might not know about.
09:41 It's right in front of our faces. Every down on the bottom of every tab of every sheet is a name.
09:47 You can double click and you can rename this. This is cool, right? Today, usually you can go here and duplicate.
09:54 You might know that. You can think tomorrow. But duplicating a tab inside of a sheet is cool, right? We probably all know that.
10:04 What you can also do is copy a single tab to either a new spreadsheet completely. So we just copy this tab to a new sheet.
10:14 We can open that spreadsheet right here and it's just that one tab. So any formulas that have anything to do with other tabs are sort of broken.
10:22 You'll get some reference errors. If we have a template or something we want in a sheet, we can create a brand new whole spreadsheet file based on this one tab.
10:31 But the coolest thing too is you can go to an existing spreadsheet. You can add this tab to something else.
10:37 So very often when I was working in their office and we sort of have to divvy up some work, we, might end up all on different spreadsheet files when we want to bring those together.
10:48 This wasn't available years and years ago, but now it is. You can copy this exact tab to a sheet. So one is you can create a nice little template for someone else to fill out and then add it to their sheet.
11:01 You could also create a template that's on a completely different file. And just keep adding it to the sheet, maybe like a monthly budget, monthly tracker, or monthly work kind of thing, project management, all that type of stuff.
11:14 We can keep working on one exact template that doesn't have to be inside of the file here. We can keep a template somewhere else.
11:24 And copied to it. So I think that's really cool. And it's one of those hacks that are right here, right in front of our face.
11:30 But you might not know it. You might not know that exists. Very, very cool feature. So I hope you enjoyed this guided tour of Google Sheets and hacks that are right in front of your face that are readily available.
11:44 Some really. Simple things to move stuff around, use named ranges, move the interface around, change the interface to how we work, how you're working, you can move it all the way down here if you want to do something completely crazy.
11:59 And if you want to get stuff out of the way, just thought it'd be fun to give you this sort of interface.
12:05 Tour and show you some really cool hacks. Just a click away, a couple double clicks, single click, click and move.
12:13 Hope this was fun.
00:07 And I wanted to give you a tour of things that are right in front of your face. These are super easy hacks that you might not know exist in Google Sheets, or you might know some, you might not know it all.
00:19 So I wanted to give you a little bit of a tour share with you sort of things you can do right away.
00:23 And that is going to make your life so much easier in Google Sheets. So the very first thing which is way bigger now in a Google Sheets just change their interface a little bit.
00:33 There's this little dot when you're focused on a cell, there's this little dot on the right hand corner, it used to be much smaller.
00:41 It's much bigger now. And your cursor will change from a cursor like a pointer. Sometimes it'll change to a plus sign.
00:50 This is super important. Because if I do like task one, and I do task two, and I want to keep naming, numbering these, I can click and I can drag this all the way down.
01:00 And I can drag this all the way down. And it'll continue iterating, it'll continue adding this number. If I do January February, if I can spell it right, I select them both, it will keep adding, even going past the year.
01:20 There you go. Oh, do Monday. I can probably do Monday. I only think I have to do one. There you go.
01:25 I only have to do one and it knows what to do. The beauty of this is that it does go sideways as well.
01:33 So you can create really simple headers, really fast. You can even do day one. Day. Two and pull them to the right and it'll just add them.
01:48 What I like to do as well is if you have a header or if you have any sort of data that you've put here and you're like, oh, I'm gonna copy paste this over here and I need to copy paste this over here for some reason.
02:01 And I need to go back and delete it. You can actually just move the entire cell. If you hover over the edge of the cell with the, and then the pointer will change into a hand and you click and you drag it, you don't have to copy paste or cut it or anything like that.
02:20 You can actually just move the entire cell. Move the entire thing. You can even move the entire column, or part of the column.
02:28 Actually, you can always move the column here. That's sort of the next thing I'll show you up here in the columns.
02:33 You can just move columns. You can just click on A, B, or C. Super simple, right? You might know this already.
02:40 Just clicking on, an A, B, C, or D will select the entire column. And then the pointer will move to a hand, and you can move it over.
02:49 You can also, if you're like, hey, I need to add a column here, you can insert one column to left or right.
02:57 But also, if you select any number of columns above one, and you do that. It'll insert two or the number of columns that you have selected.
03:06 So this is super simple to do if you're like, I need another couple of extra columns. Or you're like, I want 26 more columns.
03:13 Just select all 26 columns and then you can copy to the left or the right. And it'll insert to the left and right another 26 columns.
03:25 Same for rows. You can just click on the number here, and it'll change to a hand. You can move the rows around.
03:37 And you can also increase the size of the columns and rows If you go to the numbers or between the letters on this grid, you can click there and it will increase the size of the row here.
03:51 It will increase the size of the column here. But a little trick is if you select two columns and you go to where you would normally click and you can click and you can click and you can click here and it will increase the size drag, if you double click, it will collapse to the maximum needed space,
04:10 the column. So if I end up doing task one, two, three here, see how the, there's a little bit extra over overloading.
04:19 I go back up here and I double click, it will automatically. I automatically get that for me to the exact size I want.
04:28 And if I select more than one or two rows and I change the size, it will change the size of all of them.
04:36 Same with column. If I change the size of the rows or columns, it will change all of them. All of the size of the rows.
04:43 But this is sort of a little trick that I like to do is sometimes our data looks messy in columns like this where the column size is different.
04:52 So I'll go ahead and select all the columns and I'll just make them all the same size. Makes our data look a little bit cleaner or at least the structure of the sheet look a little bit cleaner.
05:02 And then I'll, I'll also go down the entire all rows and I'll just make that super clean all the same.
05:09 You can select the entire sheet, all rows and all columns by clicking right here in this sort of empty box between the A and the one.
05:18 You can click on the first one. We'll see here. A1. But right there between A1. A and one on the left side of A and the top side of one, you could select every single cell.
05:32 Another thing you can do is just in case your formulas get very big or have multiple lines, you can increase the size of the formula bar.
05:42 You can all. Oh. So actually go up here and show an unshow or hide the formula bar completely. So those are two separate hacks and it doesn't do command Z if they actually go back up here show formula bar again.
05:55 But this is super helpful in case you want to add a new line in the middle of a cell. So I'm going to do Command Enter to have a new line.
06:05 And maybe I want February here. Maybe I have a little bit of option 8 here. I'm going to add a little bullet point, option 8 here.
06:13 And I'm going to do Command Enter on a Mac, option 8 for the bullet point. Maybe I want all January, February, and March here.
06:21 But look at this formula. Bar. If the formula bar was normal, I wouldn't see that January. I wouldn't see beyond January.
06:29 So sometimes if we have more than one line in our formula, we want to show it all. Also in or a space or a comma or a period.
06:46 But I can also have command enter and do a new line. So I do a new line of B1 colon B5.
06:59 And I'm joining those all here. But if my formula bar. Is normal, I will only see the top which is the join literally.
07:07 So sometimes I like to show off the whole entire formula here, especially when I'm using complex formulas, formula combinations. And if you want to learn more formula combinations, make sure to check out bettersheets.co.
07:20 Slash topics slash formula. So go just to bettersheets.co. Topics and there'll be one topic there all about formula combinations. You'll see really cool stuff there and it can get pretty complex.
07:32 It can have a lot of formulas wrapped around each other there. So just like you can hide the formula bar you can also hide this menu bar.
07:44 Clicking this up chevron arrow here and that hides the menus, all those menus up there. Makes it a lot easier sometimes to see more data in your sheet.
07:56 I'm sort of working through some interesting things. You can always name ranges if you have like A1 to C1 here.
08:03 Here, you can go up to this name box, command J, it looks like to auto focus it. But you can also just click it and you can say, you know, up all the above.
08:16 Oh, I need to all the above. Very, it needs to be all one word. And now you have named range, and you can say equals all the above.
08:28 And there we go. We got all the above. What's interesting, too, is if we go down to the bottom right corner near my face high, we see the Explorer has Open Explorer and it's green.
08:43 No data here it is grayed out we don't have anything to explore but if we have some interesting we have things here we can go down to the bottom and it will have a green explore this explore is fantastic it's AI powered it shows you pretty simple little charts little insights that you can do right away
09:06 and you can ask about this data right here. How many Mondays are there? Sorry, we couldn't understand any question. Count and they tell you what kind of things they can do.
09:20 Count for row one of Monday. Sorry, we couldn't. Okay, I don't use this explorer very often. I do like it for its charts.
09:30 The very quick simple charts just to see some interesting data there. But let me share with you what I feel like is the most interesting hack that you might not know about.
09:41 It's right in front of our faces. Every down on the bottom of every tab of every sheet is a name.
09:47 You can double click and you can rename this. This is cool, right? Today, usually you can go here and duplicate.
09:54 You might know that. You can think tomorrow. But duplicating a tab inside of a sheet is cool, right? We probably all know that.
10:04 What you can also do is copy a single tab to either a new spreadsheet completely. So we just copy this tab to a new sheet.
10:14 We can open that spreadsheet right here and it's just that one tab. So any formulas that have anything to do with other tabs are sort of broken.
10:22 You'll get some reference errors. If we have a template or something we want in a sheet, we can create a brand new whole spreadsheet file based on this one tab.
10:31 But the coolest thing too is you can go to an existing spreadsheet. You can add this tab to something else.
10:37 So very often when I was working in their office and we sort of have to divvy up some work, we, might end up all on different spreadsheet files when we want to bring those together.
10:48 This wasn't available years and years ago, but now it is. You can copy this exact tab to a sheet. So one is you can create a nice little template for someone else to fill out and then add it to their sheet.
11:01 You could also create a template that's on a completely different file. And just keep adding it to the sheet, maybe like a monthly budget, monthly tracker, or monthly work kind of thing, project management, all that type of stuff.
11:14 We can keep working on one exact template that doesn't have to be inside of the file here. We can keep a template somewhere else.
11:24 And copied to it. So I think that's really cool. And it's one of those hacks that are right here, right in front of our face.
11:30 But you might not know it. You might not know that exists. Very, very cool feature. So I hope you enjoyed this guided tour of Google Sheets and hacks that are right in front of your face that are readily available.
11:44 Some really. Simple things to move stuff around, use named ranges, move the interface around, change the interface to how we work, how you're working, you can move it all the way down here if you want to do something completely crazy.
11:59 And if you want to get stuff out of the way, just thought it'd be fun to give you this sort of interface.
12:05 Tour and show you some really cool hacks. Just a click away, a couple double clicks, single click, click and move.
12:13 Hope this was fun.