Edit spreadsheets on the go with the Drive mobile app

You’re making your list, you’re checking it twice—and now you can do it from anywhere.

Just in time for this year’s holiday season, you can edit Google Sheets on your mobile device, just like you can with Google Docs. From the Drive app on your iPhone, iPad or Android device, you can create a new spreadsheet or edit an existing one. You can switch fonts, resize columns, sort data, and more. And just like on your computer, you’ll be able to see other people’s edits in real time as they’re made.

Beyond spreadsheets, you may notice a few other tweaks to the Drive app, including better text formatting when you copy and paste in a Google document. And if you’re using an Android device, you can now edit text within tables in documents and add a shortcut on the homescreen of your device to any specific file in Drive.

Whether it’s holiday recipes, shopping lists, or just your family budget, the Drive app on your mobile device makes it easy to get stuff done wherever you are.

Get the Google Drive app today from Google Play and the Apple App Store.

Posted by Shrikant Shanbhag, Software Engineer

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One click to Docs, Sheets, and Slides

Google Drive is a place where you can create, share, collaborate and keep all your stuff. Of course, there are times you want to start a new document right away–say, to take notes in class or prepare a last-minute presentation for your boss.

To make it even easier for you to create stuff quickly, Documents, Spreadsheets, and Presentations–now called Docs, Sheets, and Slides–are available as apps in the Chrome Web Store. Once installed, shortcuts to these apps will appear when you open a new tab in Chrome.

If you use a Chromebook, you’ll see Docs, Sheets, and Slides in your apps list by default following the next update to Chrome OS in a few weeks.

Posted by Jonathan Rochelle, Director of Product Management

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Edit charts in Google spreadsheets with just a click

Charts tell the story of our data, so we often spend a lot of time getting the formatting just right. That’s why we wanted to make that process quicker and easier in Google spreadsheets. Instead of opening the chart editor dialog to make formatting changes, you can now click directly on the part of the chart you want to modify to change things like the colors, legend, and labels.

You can now also resize and move the chart around to make room for other components like axis labels and the legend. To do this, click the background of the chart and choose the Move and Resize option. You’ll then be able to drag the edges of the chart and move it around to allow things like the legend labels to all fit on one line, like in the example below.

(Before/After)

Once you’re done editing, you can switch to view mode by clicking the button in the top left corner of the chart, where you can click to see the value of data points and use other helpful interactive features. 

We hope to add more charting features to this new quick edit experience over the coming months, so stay tuned.

Posted by: Hillel Maoz, Software Engineer

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Google Drive is the new home for all your Google Docs and more. Get started.

Several months ago, we launched Google Drive: one place to create, collaborate, share and keep all your stuff. If you’ve used Docs in the past, Google Drive is the new home for all your files and folders including your Google documents, spreadsheets, and presentations.

This means all your files that were previously stored in Google Docs will now be available in Google Drive. If you haven’t already started using Google Drive, you’ll see a message to try it out the next time you visit docs.google.com.

With Google Drive, you’ll get access to new features. 

• Access everywhere, every device. Drive comes with desktop and mobile apps, making it much easier to upload, sync and access your stuff from any device. Get Drive for Android and iOS and you can create and edit documents, open and share files, and upload photos and videos. 
• Find your stuff faster. Look for files by keyword and Drive searches everything — even text within scanned documents or images without any text at all. Drive also comes with a simplified navigation to help you better organize your files, and there's a new grid view to help you see thumbnails at a glance. 
• Work with more apps in Drive. Google Drive is integrated with a growing number of third-party apps, so you can do things like send faxes, edit videos and create website mockups all in one place. 

Just in case you’re not quite ready for change, you can click the “Temporarily use the old look” button on the pop-up message, but eventually all Docs users will be switched to Drive.

You may also have noticed a few other changes in the Docs world. First, you’re reading this post on the brand new googledrive.blogspot.com. But don’t worry--if you were subscribed to googledocs.blogspot.com, you’ll still automatically get all of our updates in your feed.

Our social sites have also made the switch to Drive, so if you aren’t already, follow us on plus.google.com/+GoogleDrive and twitter.com/googledrive to stay up on the latest news and updates from our team.

Visit the help center to learn more.

Posted by Scott Johnston, Group Product Manager

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Google Drive: Updates for iOS and Android

(Cross-posted from the Official Google Blog)

Every day, more and more people are choosing to live online and get things done in the cloud. Helping to make this experience as seamless as possible, Google Drive is one place where you can create, share and keep all your stuff. Drive is available on the web, as well as Mac, Windows and Android and iOS.

Updates for iOS
Starting today, if you’re using the Drive app on your iOS device you can also edit Google documents, just as you can with the Android app. From your iPhone or iPad, you can create a new document, edit an existing one or format text. And just like on your computer, you’ll be able to see other people’s edits instantly as they’re made.

You’ll also notice other new improvements to the iOS Drive app. For example, you can now view Google presentations on your iPhone or iPad, including speaker notes, full-screen mode and the ability to swipe between slides. You can also create new folders, move files into folders and upload stuff (like photos and videos) from your device directly in the Drive app.

Updates for Android 
We’re also updating the Drive app for Android phones and tablets today. You can now add comments, reply to existing comments and view tables in your Google documents. And you’ll have the same new abilities to view presentations and organize your stuff as your friends with iPhones do.

More to come... 
Looking ahead, we have plenty more planned for the Drive mobile apps—including native editing and real-time collaboration for Google spreadsheets. Stay tuned.

Get Drive in the App Store for your iPhone, iPad or iPod touch and visit the Play Store to get the latest on your Android phone or tablet. To learn more about Google Drive, visit drive.google.com/start. 
Posted by Anil Sabharwal, Senior Product Manager

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Google spreadsheets, now with discussions

Getting things done with others would be much easier if everyone was sitting right next to you. But since that’s rarely the case, we’re always updating Google Drive to make it easier to collaborate with others, no matter where you are or who you’re with.

Today we’re bringing the discussion functionality that’s already in documents and presentations to spreadsheets. If a cell has a comment in it, you'll see an orange triangle in the upper right corner and when you hover over the cell you'll see the full discussion.

The total number of comments are also tallied up at the bottom of the screen on the sheet tab, and hovering over the comment icon shows all the comments on that sheet.

And just like you’re used to with comments elsewhere, you can +mention someone to automatically include them in a discussion and send them a notification via email—and they can even reply to the comment without leaving their inbox.

Any comments that were created in spreadsheets before today are still available and saved as “Notes”. These are shown in your spreadsheet using a black triangle in the corner of the cell to differentiate them from the new discussion-style comments. You can also create new notes from the “Insert” menu if you need to leave a quick annotation on a cell.

We hope discussions makes working in spreadsheets with others more fun and productive, and we look forward to making even more improvements to collaboration in Google Drive.

Posted by Patrick Donelan, Software Engineer

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Lock down cells with Protected Ranges in Google spreadsheets

Editing with others in real-time makes it easy to get stuff done in Google spreadsheets in only a matter of minutes. But with so many people working in the same space, it’s possible to modify a section that a collaborator didn’t intend to be touched. That’s why, today, we’re updating the Named Ranges feature in spreadsheets to let you also protect them.

To get started with Protected Ranges in a shared spreadsheet, highlight the cells you’d like to protect, right-click, and choose Name and protect range from the menu.

Click through the presentation below to see the feature in action.



Even more spreadsheet features added this month 

Along with the arrival of protected ranges, you can now add colors and patterns when you apply cell borders in Google spreadsheets. We also updated find and replace to make it possible to search using patterns (also called regular expressions). For example, “^[A-Z]+” will find all the cells that start with uppercase letters.

As always, Google spreadsheets is getting better every day, so stay tuned for even more features and updates in the coming weeks.

Posted by: Joe Kaptur, Software Engineer

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March in Review: Improved charting, expanded language support, and Apps Script updates

Another month and another batch of improvements to Google Docs. We recently debuted a new spell checker that gets smarter and grows with the web, and we’ve also turned on a few features that let you do more with Docs.

New charting options 
We’ve added a bunch of new ways to make richer charts in Google spreadsheets. You can now control the opacity of an area chart, set fonts to be bold or italic, and label sections of your charts along the axis.

These new features bring the number of charting improvements up to 30 since the beginning of the year, which is about 1 new feature every 3 days. Some of our favorite charts updates include annotations, error bars, a second Y axis, donut charts, and loads of formatting options.

OCR and spreadsheets support more languages
With Google Docs, you can upload PDFs and images of scanned text and have them automatically converted into Google documents using our Optical Character Recognition (OCR) technology. Starting this week, this is available in four new languages: Hebrew, Hindi, Chinese Traditional, and Cherokee.

Language support got better in Google spreadsheets too. For Hebrew and Arabic speakers, sheets and cells now offer right-to-left support.

More ways to use Google Apps Script 
Google Apps Script is a way for developers to customize Google Docs and other Google products. Over the past month, we’ve made some changes which developers may find helpful, including:

• Support for adding your own HTML to your script’s dialogues and pages. Let’s say you wrote a script that prompts collaborators to play a game when they open a certain spreadsheet. It’s now possible to include more sophisticated HTML, like a table in the dialog that you built. 

• The option to programmatically set sheet protection in Apps Script. If you’re a teacher, you could add a script that automatically looked at all your spreadsheets and made sure that you’re the only one allowed to edit any sheet named “Grades”. 
• A redesign to the Apps Script menus. Sometimes when you’re starting a new project you’ll want to use scripts that you’ve already created. The menu changes make it easier for you to reuse scripts that you’ve already built and to share your scripts with other people . 

Posted by Michael Schidlowsky, Software Engineer

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January in Review: Styles, Sparklines, Google+ sharing, and more

One of the best things about working on web apps like Google Docs is that it gives us the flexibility to frequently bring you new features and improvements. Starting this month, we’re going to make some small changes to how we communicate what’s been happening in the world of Docs. Instead of writing blog posts for each and every minor update, we're going to try bundling them together monthly to give you a detailed overview of our favorite features and a short list of other notable changes to make sure you don't miss out on anything new.

On that note, we’ve got a bunch of new features that launched today, as well as some great things that improved over the month of January.

Customizable styles in documents
Giving your document consistent and beautiful formatting should be easy. Before today, if you wanted to update all the Subtitles in your document to look a particular way, you had to change each of them one at a time. That’s too many steps. Now you can restyle all your regular paragraphs, headings, or titles with just a couple clicks. For example, if you want to update all the Subtitles in your document to be a particular size, set one Subtitle to that size, select it, right click and choose Update Subtitle to match selection. This will change all the Subtitles already in your document and automatically update the style for any new Subtitles you create. Plus, with the new Options menu in the styles dropdown, you can set the current document’s styles as the default for new documents or you can load your default styles into the current document.

Sparklines in spreadsheets and more charting options
In Google spreadsheets, we’ve added more charting options and support for sparklines to make it easier to communicate data. The new options give you a bunch of tools to create more sophisticated charts including different Y-axes on either side of the chart, formatting options for the axis and title text, and all sorts of other customization for how your lines, bars, or pies are displayed. We’ve also added sparklines, which let you display line or bar charts inside of cells and are handy for presenting and comparing data in a simple, bite-sized way. In the example below, we’ve used sparklines to plot currency exchange rates over a 30-day period.

Sharing forms on Google+ 
Sharing the forms you create in Google Docs with the right people shouldn’t be a hassle. Today we added a Google+ share to the form editor so that you can share your forms directly with your circles with just a couple clicks.

And there’s more… 
On top of today’s new features, here are some changes from January that you may have missed:

• Adding images to your docs from a high quality stock photo gallery. Simply go to Insert > Image, select Stock photos, and then search for the images that you want.

• A more streamlined format for document discussion notifications that batches multiple discussions into a single email.
• Quickly opening and selecting items from specific menus with keyboard accelerators. For example, when using Google Chrome, Ctrl+Option+E on a Mac and Alt+E on Windows or Linux will open the Edit menu.
• Copying and pasting via the context (right click) menu in documents when you have the Chrome App installed.
• Easily adding Google drawings or Google Groups discussions to a Google Site from the Insert menu.

• Progress bars while uploading files to Google Sites.
• Searching for text inside of PDFs in your documents list using Optical Character Recognition. 

If you’d like to learn more about what we’ve been up to in January, I’ll be doing a Hangout On Air later this week this to talk about these changes and listen to your feedback. Stop by our Community Manager Teresa’s Google+ page on Thursday, February 9 at 12 p.m. EST to tune in.

Posted by: Jeff Harris, Product Manager

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Celebrating VisiCalc's 32nd birthday with the inventors of the spreadsheet

On Wednesday, VisiCalc, the first spreadsheet available for personal computers, turned 32. We invited its inventors, Dan Bricklin and Bob Frankston, to Hangout On Air with us to celebrate a product that’s paved the way for much of what the Google Docs team has been able to do today.

Users around the world tuned in to our live public stream as Dan and Bob shared the history of VisiCalc, their thoughts the spreadsheets of today, and their visions for the future. Watch the full video below.



And for you spreadsheets fanatics out there -- you can download and run a working copy of the original IBM PC VisiCalc spreadsheet program from 1981 at Dan Bricklin’s site.

Posted by: Teresa Wu, Community Manager

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This week in Docs: Import/export and paste special improvements

Yesterday, we announced the vertical merge feature in Google spreadsheets, and today we’re happy to share two new features that we hope will make analyzing data a little more efficient.

More import and export support in Google spreadsheets
Now you can convert most pivot tables between Microsoft Excel files and Google spreadsheets for powerful data analysis in whatever file format you prefer. Additionally, filters that help you better visualize and organize your data are now supported in our import and export conversion tools.

To import a pivot table you created in Microsoft Excel, click the File menu in Google spreadsheets, and select import, then select the file from the import options, and click the import button. If you’ve created a pivot table in Google spreadsheets, go to File in the spreadsheet, then click Download As, and choose Excel.

More paste special options in Google spreadsheets
Sometimes you need to copy data in cells that have lots of formatting and formulas, but you don’t always want to paste everything in the cell. For instance, you may want to copy and paste the data in a range of cells, but not the borders that you placed around the cells.

We’ve added four new paste special options including: paste all cell contents except borders, formulas only, data validation only, or conditional formatting only. You can find these new options in a list under “Paste Special” in the Edit menu of Google spreadsheets.


We hope these latest features make working with Google spreadsheets more efficient and productive. As always, let us know what you think in the forum or in the comments.

Posted by: Dan Gundrum, Product Manager

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Merge cells vertically in Google spreadsheets

There are many times when you want to format your spreadsheets in a certain way to make your data easier to read and understand. Starting today, we’ve extended the merge functionality to let you create vertical merges across several rows of data.

In the spirit of the NFL season, let’s say you want to host a football tournament for your friends. To make it easier for them to cast their votes on the winning team, you organize the NFL teams by conference and division in a Google spreadsheet. Using vertical merges, you can assign headers to sets of rows. Simply select the set of cells you’d like to merge, then click on the down arrow next to the merge icon, and select Merge vertically.


In the NFL spreadsheet, you’ll see that some of the team names don’t fit on one line in the width of the cells of Column C.

To improve the formatting, select the cells across all the rows of teams in the AFC (rows 2-17) and 2 columns (C and D) and click Merge horizontally. You’ll have 16 merged cells that span 2 columns for better formatting.


After applying vertical merges to all of the conference and division headers and horizontal merges across the team names in each conference, you’re ready to share with your friends for the tournament!


To undo a merge action, select a merged cell and click Unmerge in the drop-down menu.

We hope you enjoy customizing the formatting of your spreadsheets with this feature. Let us know what you think in the comments.

Posted by: Jakov Krolo, Software Engineer Intern

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Improved Accessibility in Google Docs and Sites

Today we announced some of the updates we’ve released recently to make Google’s applications more accessible to the blind community. For Google Docs and Sites, we’re pleased to announce new keyboard shortcuts and better screen reader support for our blind users.

Screen reader support in Google Docs and Sites
To help blind users read, edit and navigate content, Google Docs (including documents list, documents and spreadsheets) and Sites now support two screen readers: JAWS and ChromeVox. Here are a few examples of how screen readers work in Google Docs and Sites:

• In documents, you’ll hear feedback when you format text or insert tables, lists or comments in your document.
  
• In spreadsheets, you’ll hear the cell’s location, contents and comments when moving between cells.
  
• In both documents and spreadsheets, you’ll hear feedback as you navigate to areas outside the main content area, such as the menu bar, chat pane and dialog boxes.
  
• In your documents list, you’ll hear feedback when you upload or download a file, organize collections or move between files in your documents list.
  
• In Sites, you’ll hear feedback as you navigate and manage your sites, create and edit pages, and navigate through menus and dialog boxes.

For a complete list of screen reader-supported features and instructions for how to use them, visit the Docs and Sites help centers.

New keyboard shortcuts
We’ve also added new keyboard shortcuts to make it easier to use Google Docs and Sites. In your documents list, for example, you can use the up and down arrow keys to move through the files in the list, and you can open the selected document by hitting Enter. For a complete list of keyboard shortcuts, please refer to the help center articles for spreadsheets, documents, documents list and Sites.

With these new accessibility features, we hope to make it easier for everyone to use Google Docs and Sites. Please use this form to share your feedback directly with the accessibility team so we can continue to improve our products.

Posted by: Jeff Harris, Product Manager

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Tips & Tricks: Using the new Subtotal function in Google spreadsheets

This week, we added the Subtotal function to our list of functions in Google spreadsheets. One of the benefits of the Subtotal function is that it works well with AutoFilters by only using unfiltered data when performing calculations (other functions such as Sum include filtered data calculations). Subtotal also lets you change what function you’re performing on those values very quickly, by selecting an item from a drop-down list. See our help article for details.

This versatile function is often used by accountants, finance professionals, and business consultants. It can also be extremely convenient for any user -- let’s show you why.



Say that you’re helping to plan your family’s annual Labor Day beach weekend. You want to decide how many hot dogs and veggie dogs to buy. To figure this out, you create a Google spreadsheet that includes all your family members, their meat preferences, and the number of hot dogs everyone ate at the past several family gatherings:

To quickly count how many veggie dogs you need to buy based off the number of veggie dogs eaten last month, add a filter to the columns , sort to “Yes” only in Column C, and type in this Subtotal function underneath the table:

=SUBTOTAL(109, F2:F14)



Cells F2 through F14 show the number of hot dogs each family member ate last month. “109” is the code that references the Sum function (“9” would also work). Typing in a regular Sum function in this case (=SUM(F2:F14)) would have added all dogs, veggie or not, whereas Subtotal ignores hodogs which have been filtered.

Another neat feature of the Subtotal function is that the function code (such as “109” above) can easily be changed to refer to different operations like Average, Minimum, and Maximum. As a result, Subtotal can be used to condense a number of calculations into a small space.



Let’s say you want to see not only the total number of hot dogs eaten each summer month, but also the average number eaten. Rather than creating two different functions (Sum and Average) for each month, you can use Subtotal.

• In an open cell -- let’s use B15 -- you would create a drop-down list with the codes for the Sum and Average function (109 and 101 respectively).
• And under the column for each month, you would write a Subtotal function, but reference cell B15 instead of typing in a code.

For June, therefore, your function would read: =SUBTOTAL(B15, D2:D14)



Every time you change which code appears in cell B15 through the drop-down, the values under each month will change, showing either the total or the average number of hot dogs eaten by your family with just one click.





We hope the Subtotal function makes your data analysis a lot easier -- and maybe even more fun.



Posted by: Lai Kwan Wong, Software Engineer

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Making Google spreadsheet functions easier to discover and use

From the simple SUM function to GoogleLookup, Google spreadsheets continues to add features that help you power through data. But sometimes it can be a challenge to find the one you need to use or figure out the right way to use it. We’ve made the following improvements to help you quickly discover and understand all of the powerful functions that Google spreadsheets has to offer.



Help snippets directly in spreadsheets

You shouldn’t have to interrupt your work to figure out how to build a particular formula, which is why we’re bringing help documentation directly into Google spreadsheets.



As soon as you start typing a formula into a cell, you’ll notice an auto-suggest box with the name and syntax of the function you might be looking for. Mouse over any of the suggested functions, and you’ll see a description that explains the function, its syntax, and how it’s used. You’ll also see links to related content and a link to the complete list of functions.





Auto-suggest displays syntax and help documentation for all 300+ available functions and even recognizes nested functions, making it easier to build complex formulas.



Revamped help documentation in the Google Docs Help Center

We’ve also completely rebuilt our help documentation for Google spreadsheet functions with invaluable input from some of our most active forum users such as ahab, yogia1, Ted J, A.P.L, MarinusP, and other forum Top Contributors. Here’s a look at what’s new:

• A completely new table for browsing help documentation for all 300+ Google spreadsheets functions. This table is easy to browse, sort or search. To view the table, you can visit the Google Docs Help Center, click the complete list of functions link in the auto-suggest help snippets, or select Help > Function list in any Google spreadsheet.
• Help documentation for nearly 60 new functions and formulas.
• More detailed help documentation, including better instructions for some of our most sophisticated and complex functions.

All of these improvements are now in English, and will be available in additional languages in the coming weeks. So take advantage of these new resources at your fingertips and you’ll be a Google spreadsheets ninja in no time.



Posted by: Michael Schidlowsky, Software Engineer

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Use new Google spreadsheets charts in your documents and drawings

Today, we’re releasing a few new types of charts, plus a feature that allows you to copy your charts from spreadsheets into documents and drawings. Sound good? Bet your bar chart it does. Let’s show you how it works.

Start by creating a chart. Then, select the chart by clicking on it once, which will display the chart’s name. Click the chart name or the arrow next to it to open the dropdown menu of chart actions. From the menu, select Copy chart.


Next, open the document or drawing where you’d like to insert the chart and position the cursor where you’d like the chart to go. Use the Web Clipboard dropdown menu, as shown below, to locate your copied chart.


As you hover the mouse over the menu item for the chart, a thumbnail will be displayed. Clicking on the chart item will paste it into the document as an image, which can then be resized, aligned, etc. Here’s an example of a chart pasted into a document:


Note that the chart snapshots are just that -- they are images of the chart at the time of copying and therefore do not update as the spreadsheet data changes. If you need to update a chart, just copy and paste it again.

The name of the chart shown in the Web Clipboard menu is the same as the chart’s name in the spreadsheet, which you can easily change from the default name, “Chart 1.” To rename a chart, select Edit chart from the chart’s action menu, and enter a new name on the Customize tab. This is particularly handy when working with charts from multiple spreadsheets.

We’ve also introduced a few new types of charts to Google spreadsheets. We now support candlestick charts and combo charts (which allow you to show columns, lines, and area lines all on the same graph). You can also use the GeoMap chart to insert a data-driven map of the world, a continent, or a country into your spreadsheet. Our TreeMap chart, meanwhile, should be exciting for the statisticians and logicians among you.

We hope this makes creating great documents easy as pie (charts, of course).

Posted by: Ben Margolin, Software Engineer

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This week in Docs and Sites: A spreadsheets shortcuts menu, PPTX support and more

This week, we’re introducing a number of enhancements to Google Docs and Sites: a spreadsheets shortcuts menu, support for PPTX conversion, a new RSS gadget, and improved mobile rendering for Sites.

Spreadsheets shortcuts
Although shortcuts have long been available in your Google spreadsheets, we've added a shortcuts menu to spreadsheets to make them easier to find -- saving you even more time. Hit Ctrl+/ (or Cmd+/ on a Mac) to pull up the list of shortcuts and learn new ways to sharpen your spreadsheet skills. Remember that shortcuts can vary depend on the operating system and browser you're using -- the example below is the menu you’d see if you were using a Chrome browser on a Mac.


Support for conversion of PPTX files to Google presentations
Starting today, you can convert PPTX files to Google presentations by either uploading the file from your desktop or converting the file from your documents list. Just follow the same simple steps as you normally would when converting files to Google Docs formats.

Better customization for your RSS Gadget in Sites
We’ve also added a new RSS gadget for Google Sites to our “Featured” gallery.


The new RSS gadget gives you complete control over the appearance of the gadget: You can customize any aspect of the feed, including font, color, size, number of items to display, and post length.

To set your gadget, go to Insert > More Gadgets > Featured, and look for RSS Feed.


Improved mobile rendering
After we released our initial version of Google Sites automatic mobile rendering, you enabled the option for over 50,000 sites, making it clear that you’re looking for a better way to easily publish content for mobile devices.

Based on what you’ve told us, we’re adding the additional behaviors to make automatic mobile rendering on Google Sites even better, including:

• Images and header logos automatically scale in mobile mode
• Gadgets and text boxes have widths that fit mobile devices
• Pages with multi-column layouts stack columns vertically on mobile

Before

After

Thanks for continuing to let us know what you think about our products -- these changes wouldn’t be possible without you.

Posted by: Rajiv Bammi, Software Engineer

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Summarize your data with pivot tables

Starting today, we're rolling out pivot tables in Google spreadsheets. Pivot tables make it easy to process and summarize large data sets in seconds. Check out the video below for a look at how pivot tables work in Google spreadsheets:



In essence, a pivot table does just that -- it allows you to “pivot” or rotate data, thus looking at it from different angles and seeing a variety of patterns which may not be immediately obvious. Let’s take a very simple example of a list of students. This list includes a number of students and some information about them, including gender, class level, and major.


To create a pivot table, select your data and go to Data > Pivot Table Report. In the pivot table report editor, you can add fields to set your rows, columns, and values and can drag and drop the fields around within the editor. Here, we’ve used pivot tables to display the number of students in each class level by gender.


Fields in the Values section can be summarized using built-in formulas to sum, count, or otherwise calculate your data. In the example above the number of students in each class level was summarized via a simple count.


The filter section lets you specify exactly what data you want to be included in the pivot table. For example, we can choose to only count the students in certain extracurricular activities.


With each change, the pivot table is updated in real-time for both you and any collaborators. If you prefer to make changes in batches, you can switch to manual mode. In this mode, your changes won’t be saved until you select Update table.

You can try pivot tables out for yourself using this template or by using your own data set. Please note that pivot tables from Microsoft Excel can’t be uploaded to Google spreadsheets at this time.

We hope you’ll enjoy exploring pivot tables in Google spreadsheets and that they’ll save you time analyzing your data. Check out our help content for even more examples.

Posted by: Matt Ziegelbaum, Software Engineer

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Upload images in Google Spreadsheets

(Cross-posted to the Google Enterprise Blog)

We’re excited to announce that you can now upload images to Google spreadsheets. From the Insert menu, select Image... Then, choose an image file to upload into your spreadsheet.


With this feature, you can upload an image already stored on your computer, search for an image online, or add personal photos directly from one of your Picasa Web Albums.


Let us know what you think in the Google spreadsheets forum!

Posted by: Nick Santos, Staff Software Engineer

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Improved printing in Spreadsheets

In January, we added support for Google Cloud Print to mobile documents. Today, we’re extending that functionality to mobile spreadsheets and adding some additional printing improvements to the desktop version of Google spreadsheets.

Mobile printing for spreadsheets
Now you can print your spreadsheets to any cloud-connected printer right from your phone by selecting Print... underneath the spreadsheet title. This feature will work on most phones and tablets that support HTML5, such as devices running Android 2.1+ and iOS 3+.


Improved desktop printing
We’ve added a number of printing options, including spreadsheet titles, sheet names and page numbers. You have control over which of these you want to print.

We hope you enjoy these improvements to printing.

Posted by: Jakov Krolo, Software Engineering Intern

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