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Google Sheets is one of the best alternatives to Microsoft Excel, and it’s free to use. It employs intuitive AI technology to automatically fill in cells with data based on your patterns. This is called the Smart Fill feature. Well, Google just enhanced its Smart Fill feature to make Sheets even easier to use. There’s a catch, however.
Google introduced the Smart Fill feature back in 2020. Using AI, the platform can automatically fill in cells based on information that you typically type in that sheet. For example, if you constantly type your email address, then it will pick up on that. Then, once you start typing in your address, it will automatically fill the cell with your address to save you time.
Google Sheets is getting an enhanced Smart Fill feature
So, as you can guess, this enhanced Smart Fill feature uses some powerful generative AI. The typical Smart Fill feature only offers suggestions based on existing data. However, this new feature will be able to generate text as well.
According to the Google Blog post, this new feature will recognize patterns such as: “sentiment classification, combining and generating text, extracting specific text, formatting addresses, structuring phone numbers and emails, condensing text and more.” So, in the style of Google Bard, it will be able to actually create data based on what’s present in the document.
The company gave an example of organizing restaurant reviews. Below, we see a spreadsheet organizing the reviews by their reviews and star rating. After we see the person input star ratings for some of the reviews, the AI was able to get an idea of how the star ratings reflect the review. It reads the reviews and guesses the star rating based on the review.
We see one review that reads “meh”, and the AI gave it a 2-star rating. Another one reads “A little pricey, but it’s worth it for the price”; it gave that review a 4-star rating. That helps speed up the process of adding the information.
That’s just one example of the potential of this feature. There are other applications of this feature, and you’ll be able to discover them when you use it.
Now, here comes the catch
If you thought that you could use this feature for free, we have bad news. If you want to use the Google Sheets enhanced Smart Fill feature, then you’ll need to be a Duet AI subscriber. In order to be a Duet AI subscriber, you’ll need to be on the $30/month Workspace Enterprise plan.