Doubling calculation speed and other new innovations in Google Sheets

Snapshot: We’re making it easier and faster to format, calculate, and manage your data in Google Sheets, whether you’re just getting started or are already a Sheets expert. Today we’re sharing the latest advancements in Sheets that will help you be more productive, from everyday tasks to complex projects.

"Google Sheets is our preferred spreadsheet application, giving us a real-time solution for collaboration to activate data-driven decisions."  — Chris Montfot, Head of Strategic Operations for Corporate Engineering, Robinhood (read the blog)

Doubling calculation speed in Sheets

Building on improvements like smooth scrolling and expanded cell limits in Sheets, today we’re announcing that we’ve doubled the speed of calculation in Sheets on Google Chrome and Microsoft Edge browsers, improving the experiences of running formulas, creating pivot tables, using conditional formatting, and more. Whether you’re a small business owner analyzing revenue, a finance leader managing millions of values, or a brand manager reviewing the latest orders of a product line, you want to see changes in your data reflected quickly. Regardless of how large your file is, or what type of calculation you’re trying to do — from the simplest of SUM calculations to a complex query — now your calculation can run significantly faster. 

We’ve partnered with the Google Chrome team on this performance initiative and we’ve also delivered this improvement when using Sheets in the Edge browser. In the future, we expect these improvements to be available in Safari and Firefox as well. This improved calculation speed is made possible by WasmGC, a new web technology that enables faster code execution. You can learn more about how our engineering team achieved these improvements in this case study. In addition to calculation speed, we’re constantly exploring new ways to improve the Sheets experience. For instance, we’re currently working to reduce initial load time and improve copy/paste and filter performance.

New ways to get started quicker in Sheets

We’re also making it easier for you to start organizing your data in Sheets. Often just beginning to build a spreadsheet is a daunting task — no matter how experienced you are with data. To give you a head start, we announced the new side panel experience in Gemini for Workspace that allows you to chat with Gemini to summarize, analyze, and generate content. In Sheets, the side panel will leverage insights from your emails, documents, and more to build a contextually relevant spreadsheet, and provide an automatic summary of the spreadsheet you’re working on.

"We've also been able to speed up the planning phase of our campaigns with Help me organize. By entering a simple prompt like, ‘Create a project plan for a full-funnel marketing campaign around a spring product launch’, we get a first draft of a plan in Sheets to kickstart the project." — Ranjan Roy, VP of Strategy, Adore Me (read the blog)

We recently also announced pre-built tables so that you always have a starting point for organizing your data. Whether it’s project management, event planning, inventory management, or something else, you never have to build a spreadsheet from scratch again.

Faster ways to format and manage your data in Sheets

Structuring and polishing data in Sheets is now easier with the new tables feature. Let Sheets do the heavy lifting to format and organize data so that you don’t have to — tables will apply an improved design that includes column types, filters, color coding, dropdown menus, and more. So whether you’re a recruiter managing applicant data, a marketer building a campaign launch tracker, or a salesperson tracking the different stages of open opportunities, tables will automatically align all inputs, reducing the need for manual adjustments. Plus, tables will ensure all entered data has the right formatting based on the column type that you select.

Improving project management with custom alerts

People love using Sheets because of how seamless it is for entire teams to work on a single spreadsheet together. Teams regularly use Sheets to track complex projects, budgets, schedules and more, and it’s often challenging to stay on top of the many changes that happen, especially when there is so much collaboration happening. That’s why we’ve introduced conditional notifications, which allow you to create rules in spreadsheets that send email alerts when certain criteria are met. For example, a notification can be sent when a specific column’s value, such as the “Status” column, undergoes a change. Conditional notifications is just the start of automation in Sheets.

Driving change for our customers

From streamlining campaign planning to facilitating real-time collaboration, the power and scale of Sheets enables teams to be more productive, no matter where they are. With AI, Sheets goes beyond basic spreadsheet functionality and becomes a powerful tool for project management that enables strategic decision-making.

“It used to be challenging to keep track of where we were in the process but the Help me organize feature in Google Sheets has become our secret weapon, allowing us to design step-driven processes with unparalleled flexibility. Now, we have a unified place to build and organize plans, trackers, and timelines, and keep them up to date in real time." - Tim Tochette, Owner & President, Attache (read the blog)

We’re thrilled to see so many organizations — across technology, transportation, retail, healthcare, and more — relying on Sheets to drive their business or mission. Every day we hear from customers that Sheets has helped boost productivity for their employees and accelerate decision making on critical business initiatives. We’re committed to delivering more innovations to Sheets this year and beyond. 

Learn more about the latest updates and start using Sheets today.