Hi Reader,

Welcome to the Google Sheets Tips newsletter #279, your Monday morning espresso, in spreadsheet form!

I hope you had fun on Halloween last week!

This year, we dressed up as vampires and baguettes from our local bakery 🧛🥖

A big thank you to this week's sponsors who help keep this newsletter free to read:

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➜ News

I.
​Much as I love spreadsheets, they're not always the answer (shocking, I know!). When you have data that frequently changes and is deeply interconnected, it's better to use a more robust data setup, like Google AppSheet. My friend and fellow Google Developer Expert, Pablo Felip just released the first of four introductory articles on AppSheet:

​Discovering Google AppSheet in 48 hours​

(Also available in Spanish here.)

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➜ Google Sheets Tip #279: New Rating Smart Chips ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐

Google recently announced the Rating Smart Chip, available to all Google Workspace customers and personal accounts. It's rolling out as we speak so you should already have access or get access very soon.

It lets you add ratings to spreadsheet cells to indicate a rating out of five. For example, you might want to rank movies you've watched or digital tools you've used.

Here's what it looks like:

How To Add Star Rating

There are two ways to add a star rating:

1) Go to the menu: Insert > Smart chips > Rating

2) Use the @-menu by typing "@rating" into a blank cell:

You can change the star rating by either typing a number between 1 and 5 in that cell or by clicking on the smart chip and selecting the rating you want.

You can also apply the rating to cells that already contain a number between 1 and 5, and the correct rating will be added.

Format Tips

Use the Font Color option in the toolbar to change the color of the stars:

Unfortunately, you can't change the color of the smart chip background, so the grey pill is always there.

So if you really want to hide it, you can change the background color of the cell to match the grey by selecting a custom color and entering this hex code: #e8eaed

Use In Formulas?

One thing you can't do with these rating smart chips is use them in formulas.

You might want to do that if your data expands and you want to automatically add star ratings to new rows.

To do that, you can use a formula to add stars. Start with the simple CHAR formula and upgrade to a named function version if you use it a lot.

⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐

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If you enjoyed this newsletter, please forward it to a friend who might enjoy it.

Have a great week!

Cheers,
Ben

P.S. Everyone’s rock bottom is registering for a data analytics course​