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Sheets Tip 332: Effortless Menu Navigation π
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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. βCheck 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: β β Sheets Tip 332: Menu Search Tool πThis 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...?"β |
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