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Hi Reader,

Welcome to the Google Sheets Tips newsletter #369, your Monday morning espresso, in spreadsheet form!

We had our first snowfall of the season last Friday, so winter is definitely underway here in the Mid-Atlantic region. It was only a light dusting though, so the sleds are still hanging in the garage. For now.

In this issue, we're looking at a clever way to add visual clues to our data tables with indicator arrows ▲🔻.

And, if you're a Workspace customer, you must read the major announcement from Google last week: they've just launched a new tool for building Workspace AI Agents called Workspace Studio. Check it out below.

➜ News

I.
​Last week Google introduced Google Workspace Studio, a place to create and manage AI agents for your Workspace accounts (think if Zapier and Gemini had a baby...).

This sounds really promising for automating a lot of tedious Workspace actions. And no coding is required.

​Read more here >>​

Available for Google Workspace Business/Enterprise/Education, plus Google AI Pro for Education and AI Ultra for Business plans.

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➜ Sheets Tip #369: Indicator arrows in Tables ▲🔻

In today's tip, we'll learn how to add status or indicator arrows (▲ or ▼) to our Tables to quickly show trends:

We'll use the Custom Number Format tool, which has a hidden conditional formatting option for setting different formats for > 0, = 0, or < 0.

It’s a great way to highlight your data and it's fully dynamic, meaning if your data changes, so will the arrow direction and color.

In this example, we have a forecast value and an actual value.

Next to that we have a delta column that calculates the difference between the actual - forecast:

We'll apply the conditional arrows formatting to this delta column.

Step 1: Highlight the whole delta column.

Step 2: Open the custom number formatting menu from the toolbar:

Format > Number > Custom number format

Step 3: Add this custom number rule:

into the input box at the top of the custom number format popup.

The three conditions are separated by semicolons. The first rule specifies what to do with positive numbers, the second rule is for negative numbers, and the third rule applies to 0.

The colors are set in the square brackets. For a full list of these [colorX] codes, see here.

Step 4: Press "Apply"

And voila! There you have it. The delta numbers now show as indicator triangles.

One benefit of applying custom number rules like this is that the data in the cell is still a number. In other words, we could still operate on that data (e.g. multiply, divide etc.) without any problems.

Bonus: if you want to show the number as well as the status indicator, change the rule slightly to include the number in front of the indicator arrow:

which looks like this in our Sheet:

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

Have a great week!

Cheers,
Ben

P.S. Well, this is one solution for all that leftover Thanksgiving food​