Newsletter
The version of Google Sheets featured in Google’s enterprise-targeted G Suite productivity platform is getting the ability to record macros in order to automate scripts, allowing repetitive work to be automated and done at a high speed. Macros follow a Sheets spreadsheet from place to place and user to user, and anybody who wants to run a macro on a particular Sheet can do so without disturbing other users who are currently working with the same document. This collaboration-focused macro feature extends to anybody that the document is shared with, which means that you can pass around spreadsheets to share macros so that people can use them with other spreadsheets. As of this writing, this change is live for G Suite users but has not hit the regular version of Sheets, and most likely won’t be making that jump anytime soon, if ever.
While the new macro capability is the star of the new update, it’s not the only new thing that G Suite Sheets users can do. Users who routinely print their Sheets will be pleased to find that custom paper sizes are now available, and you can manually add in page breaks for printing. For pivot tables, you can now group data together by a given time frame, such as by week, month, or year. Finally, in normal use, there are now more options for grouping rows and columns, and you can now add spots for checkboxes within a cell, rather than having to have a separate cell for a checkbox next to a given piece of data.
Ever since the inauguration of G Suite, Google has been hard at work pushing out updates and changes for all products under that umbrella. Sheets, in particular, has gotten a number of new features and usability enhancements that made its existing functions easier to use in recent times. One example of that ongoing support is the integration of Google’s powerful AI technology to allow automatic analysis of pivot tables, meaning team members who may have little understanding of data analytics or how to pull data from a spreadsheet or a group of spreadsheets can still use pivot tables effectively by having AI group the data and spit out the results for them.
