Brought to you by:

Hi Reader,

Welcome to the Google Sheets Tips newsletter #389, your Monday morning espresso, in spreadsheet form!

After a major work sprint to launch the 28 Days to Gemini Mastery course earlier this spring, I recently took a few weeks off to visit my brother and his family in Australia.

We spent time hiking and packrafting in Tasmania's remote and beautiful Southwest National Park. It was an incredible trip and, without cell service for 12 days, a true break from the noise of our modern world.

Unfortunately, it did mean that I missed the Google Next 26 conference. So, between jet lag and responding to emails, I spent a chunk of last week catching up on all the news from Google Next. And boy, was there a lot to catch up on!

The main theme was the continued evolution from AI assistance (Gemini helping you) to Agent workflows (Gemini doing things for you).

Below, you'll find a summary of the main announcements that relate to us as Google Sheets & Workspace power users and developers. Let me know which announcement you're most excited about!

But first, and on the subject of Australia, check out this upcoming conference happening in Melbourne, Australia this June, from this week's sponsor:

Brought to you by: Data in Schools Join us for the 10th Data in Schools Conference at The University of Melbourne! This immersive two-day event explores how to foster a comprehensive, whole-school culture of data-informed practice. This conference will be bringing together educators, administrators, and data enthusiasts. We will explore using data to drive school-wide improvement, from curriculum development to student support. Most conferences offer lectures; we offer a roadmap. Join a select group of educators to bridge the gap between data collection and school-wide excellence. With expert-led workshops and intimate small-group discussions, you’ll leave with the tools to build a truly data-informed environment. Don't Just Attend—Collaborate and Innovate

➜ #389: Catching up on all the new AI and Sheets announcements 💥

Here’s a list of the most interesting for us Sheets/Workspace developers. It's also available to read online in this blog post.

What are you most excited about?

Across Google Workspace

• Google Workspace Intelligence: making Gemini assistant smarter by letting it tap into your organization’s actual work context, not just the open internet. It looks at your work content and patterns and reasons over that.
• Universal Search: Agents can search across all Workspace Apps to get a consolidated view of the user’s context across all apps.
• ​Official Workspace CLI (Command Line Interface) to call Workspace APIs from command line.
• Dedicated Workspace MCP Server: For Gmail, Drive, Calendar, Chat, People.
• ​Agent Control Centre in Google Workspace Admin Console to help you monitor, control, and audit agent access to your data in Workspace.

Gemini in Sheets

• ​Build or edit entire spreadsheets: Using natural language.
• Sheets canvas (see announcement #1): To build fully interactive mini-apps right on top of your data, like dashboards, heat maps, kanban boards, and more.
• ​Fill with Gemini: AI assisted way to fill in your data quickly using drag and drop or prompts.
• ​Capacity & Performance: Sheets capacity doubled to 20 million cells and faster performance in Sheets.🔥
• ​Unstructured text: Paste and convert unformatted text into Google Sheets tables with Gemini.

Google Apps Script

• ​Built-in Gemini sidebar within Apps Script: Code explanation, generation, modification, and debugging.
• ​Apps Script as a core service: From June 2026, brings better reliability, security and compliance.

Workspace Studio

​Workspace Studio is the new visual, drag-and-drop tool that lets users build workflow agents using natural language, announced at the end of 2025. New features coming:

• Skills feature (see announcement #2): To deploy agentic automation across every team.
• ​NotebookLM Integration: Integrate notebooks from NotebookLM directly into Google Workspace Studio automation workflows to use existing documents as a grounded knowledge source.
• Third-Party Connectors: Out-of-the-box integration for agents to pull data from Asana, Jira, Mailchimp, and Salesforce directly into Workspace.
• ​Gems Integration: An “Ask a Gem” step that allows flows to send prompts to private Gems to automate summaries or document creation.

Further Reading

Here’s the full list of all 260 product announcements from Google Next 2026:

​260 things we announced at Google Cloud Next ’26​

(The Google Workspace announcements are at the very bottom of the list.)

And here is Google’s official video summarizing the key Workspace announcements:

​

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

Have a great week!

Cheers,
Ben

P.S. Smooth moves. Which is your favorite? My favorite is the cyclist.