Hi Reader,

Welcome to the Google Sheets Tips newsletter #395, your Monday morning espresso, in spreadsheet form!

I moved house last week. 🏡

It's a lot of work to pack up a house and set up a new one. And it's amazing how much stuff you accumulate, especially when: 1) you've lived somewhere for a long time, and 2) have children.

A move is the perfect opportunity to declutter and get rid of stuff that isn't serving you anymore. We had a big yard sale (aka a jumble sale for my outside-the-US readers) before we left the old house. And even now, every time we open a box to unpack it, we're asking "do we really still need this?"

But in addition to physical stuff, a move is a unique opportunity to let go of mental baggage and old assumptions. Change can be difficult—I was sad to leave our old house—but more often than not (assuming the change is voluntary) the outcome is a positive one.

You're probably not moving house this week, but what physical stuff or mental baggage can you clear out?

➜ News

I.
​Another week, another chart upgrade! We can now create and import scatter charts with multiple x-series in Google Sheets.

​Read more here >>​

II.
​Demand outweighs supply for AI-skilled workers. Develop skills that other will pay for and ensure you're in demand as the world shifts to AI-first.

III.
Google Workspace Skills are launching in the Gemini Beta program. Skills are reusable instructions that you give to Gemini to achieve tasks across your Workspace apps. Rolling out over the coming weeks to anyone enrolled in the Gemini Beta program.

​Read more about Skills here >>​

➜ Sheets Tip #395: Sort and Filter by color

In this tip, we look at the sort by color and filter by color techniques to organize your data based on the color of text or cells within the data.

For example, you might highlight rows of data relating to an important customer. Sort by color and filter by color let you bring those highlighted rows to the top of your dataset, or only show those rows.

Suppose we have this Google Sheets Table of real estate transactions, with some highlighted yellow:

Sort By Color

Select any column and click the column menu (the triangle next to column heading) and choose Sort column > Fill color

We can sort by the background color of the cell (like the yellow in this example) or by the color of the text.

The result of applying this sort is all the yellow rows will be brought to the top of our dataset.

This is super helpful for reviewing all these items at the same time. Another use case is to highlight and then delete duplicate rows.

Filter By Color

The filter by color method is very similar to the sort by color method.

From the column menu, select Filter by color > Fill color

This action displays only the rows with yellow background (for cells in that specific column):

Both of these techniques are handy tools for quick ad-hoc data analysis.

I use them frequently, especially in conjunction with conditional formatting for investigating duplicate rows.

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

Have a great week!

Cheers,
Ben

P.S. This is an amazing short poem that makes you stop and think.

Thanks to the Semi-Rad.com newsletter for sharing.