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Welcome to the Google Sheets Tips newsletter #332, your Monday morning espresso, in spreadsheet form! Today I have a quick and easy tip to share with you. It's a useful, but probably underused, feature of Google Sheets that makes it super easy to find things in the menus. Check it out below. But before that, I want to share my latest AI + Sheets experiment. At the end of last week, OpenAI launched Operator, an AI agent tool that can browse websites and perform actions on your behalf. In the demo, they showed it ordering show tickets and groceries. I decided to test it out with an entirely different remit... involving Sheets of course. Check out this video where I let OpenAI take control of my spreadsheet and challenge it to create a pivot table, chart, and Apps Script automation, with as little input from me as possible: ➜ Sheets Tip 332: Menu Search Tool 🔍This is one of those incredibly useful features in Sheets that flies under the radar. But once you know about it, and start using it, it makes you wonder how on earth you lived without it. Sat here writing this newsletter, I'm saying to myself "I should use this more often!" You'll find the Search the menus feature on the far left edge of the toolbar: Click the magnifying glass to get started or press the shortcut key Alt + / (Windows, Chrome OS) or Option + / (Mac). Type your intention into the popup window and it'll take you directly to that feature: For example, suppose you want to apply custom number formatting. Start typing and click on the relevant result: You can drill down into any part of the toolbar, not just the top level options. For example, you can quickly control the background fill color of a cell via this menu: Don't sleep on this one! It's worth investing a few minutes each day to lock in the muscle memory for the keyboard shortcut. If you enjoyed this newsletter, please forward it to a friend who might enjoy it. Have a great week! Cheers, P.S. Medieval artist "you know how to paint a horse from the front, right...?" |
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Hi Reader, Welcome to the Google Sheets Tips newsletter #363, your Monday Tuesday* morning espresso, in spreadsheet form! (* arriving in your inbox on a Tuesday, because it was Columbus Day in the US yesterday.) Almost two years ago, I launched a course called "The AI Playbook for Google Sheets", which explored how to use basic AI inside Sheets. (Fun fact: this was my last course launch!) A lot has changed since then! Today, Gemini and other AI tools can manipulate data, generate formulas,...
Brought to you by: Hi Reader, Welcome to the Google Sheets Tips newsletter #362, your Monday morning espresso, in spreadsheet form! Last week I finished recording and editing all the video lessons for the new Modern Google Sheets course (woohoo!). I keep track of progress in a Google Sheet (where else of course!) using Tables and dropdown chips: (click to enlarge) I'm using Tables extensively now in my Sheets work. I find the benefits over plain data—such as the dropdown chips, table...
Brought to you by: Hi Reader, Welcome to the Google Sheets Tips newsletter #361, your Monday morning espresso, in spreadsheet form! I'm excited to share today's tip with you. I came across it years ago but then forgot about it until today. And I'm kicking myself because it's so useful! I'm pretty sure I'll be using it on a daily basis now... read on to find out what it is. ➜ News I.Last week, Google announced a significant enhancement to formula generation in Gemini for Sheets, making the...