Google Sheets Interface Changes

New Date Chips and Integration with Google Workspace makes Google Sheets much more useful, within the ecosystem. It's a great tool within workspace now.

Google Sheets Interface Changes on YouTube

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7L_zm-gc7es

Transcript:

(00:00) Hello, welcome. So this video is pretty informal. It's about the new interface changes in Google Sheets, and maybe some things you might have missed that are pretty new to Google Sheets. I was rereading recently this, I'm recording this in April, and this article came out in end of February. So it's been out a couple months already, almost a couple months next week, February 24th.
(00:22) Yeah, in about a week, this will be out for a couple months. And actually the changes of Google Sheet's interface have started rolling out, as you'll see this sort of pill shaped blueish, grayish area here now, which this used to be all sheets, white or gray. But what is interesting about this article, cause I was like really trying to figure out why.
(00:46) Why did Google do this? What is the impact? Why is this better than say not doing it right? Why do it in instead of just leaving sheets alone? And what is interesting is that Google Sheets is moving towards a more of a tool within Google Workspace than a standalone spreadsheet software. And it's in this article that I miss this pattern.
(01:11) Where really Google Sheets is a tool in your work team, in your team and in workspace. So it's adding this gray, this pill thing across everywhere. So docs it said docs, slides, sheets. And so this is interesting that it's going to be more Again a visual representation that these things are connected and could be connected even more.
(01:38) And we have new chips and some new things that I'm not sure you know about because let's look at this. So if you wanted today's date, usually you would have to write equals today, and then you have parenthesis and you have today's date. But now you can write today, at today, if we can zoom in here and see this.
(01:59) That is all you need, and you can select today's date. Let's select it and see what, let's see today, at today, if we select today's date, We now get the same thing. But this is more powerful because now it doesn't look like I actually put in a date sorry, a formula. This formula will all constantly update.
(02:19) But the at today, if we just do at today, this is. Not going to update or it will keep today's date, but this today will constantly update. So it's interesting. Now I can see, between these two things, there's two very good reasons why you would use one or not the other I have always used this formula equals today so that I can filter things like if you have actions that are taking place and you wanna say, I only wanna see the last seven days, so you just.
(02:48) As a start date or an end date, you would say today, and then you can do this equals minus seven usually, and you can get seven days ago. So now you have a start date and an end date for every time you open the sheet. It'll be seven days ago and then today. But if you're like, you know what, I just want today's date and I don't necessarily want to have to remember a, the.
(03:13) Or figure it out. Of course, the date's everywhere, but like just that action at today can select today's date and done. And it is a function. It's not a function, but it is a pickable date here. That's pretty cool. But there's something else you can access. And again, being part of Google Workspace makes this really powerful.
(03:34) You can start getting files into. But not just that you can do data extraction. How do you do data extraction? It's in this article here when we do smart chip data extraction allows you to enrich sheets with information about people, files, events. For example, if you need key contact details for a project, you can right click the relevant sales select data extraction right here.
(03:56) And it should show up over here where data right around the dropdown in smart chips, but it is rolling out pretty soon. They say at the end of February, they said in a few weeks. We'll see how that is. We're now two months old into this and we don't have data extraction on our workspace, but you might.
(04:15) And going back to the today, you also have at yesterday, at tomorrow and at date, which. Management of timelines easier, so we can just type in yesterday and there we go. Yesterday's date. Really interesting that they've made this, a selectable thing I don't know why you can't necessarily just do tomorrow there and you can hit enter and there you go.
(04:40) We got yesterday's date. Tomorrow's date, and then at date. We can now select from a picker any date we want. Really? Cool. You can just hit enter or you don't have to select it. I know sometimes we don't necessarily know what buttons to press when with these new interfaces, but you can just hit enter.
(04:58) So you can just do at yesterday. Hit enter, and there you go. At date. Hit enter. Oh, and it also gives you a little selection if you just do at date there, you can hit the down arrow for today's date, down twice for tomorrow's date, and third time for yesterday's date. Pretty cool. And then also it appears there are finance chips, so we can just do like a ko think.
(05:22) There's Coca-Cola there. So the finance chips allow you to get the stock stuff, again, this is different way to access Google Finance. So you can use Coco Finance KO for that is the price of ko, which is Coca-Cola. But here, this what is this called? Finance chip. Allows you to see much more details. You have people file chips, calendar events, place and finance chips.
(05:47) Really interesting way to use Google Sheets now. So while the overarching news in the world right now and online is ai, I think these new interface Chips and these file extraction, data extraction is gonna be pretty cool especially if you're managing many sheets. I have talked about a little bit, managing sheets of sheets like you now can build a sheet of sheets much easier around projects and get timelines and owners of these sheets and really manage your Google Drive much easier and better from a Google sheet.
(06:17) What's really cool though is like with AI and these new interface changes coming, how are they going to combine into interesting ways? I spoke a little bit in another video about AI and Google Sheets about this explorer. We have Explorer, this is AI inside of sheets we already have. Google Sheets offering us formulas if it knows okay, we have today, whoops, not today, tomorrow we have, let's do 34.
(06:44) And if we do some, it should see, it says D three to D four. It automatically knows. And these are little bit ai, little bit just heuristics like, okay, we have. Only cells that have data in them, we're gonna hit that sum. But that sum is really cool to make it very easy and fast to be able to do simple tables and do the things we do every single day, or weekly write-ups, we can do really fast.
(07:08) And so AI is already in sheets. How is it gonna continue to be integrated into sheets? I think it will be through this explore feature we'll probably be able to do, see, we can ask date about this data now, but maybe we can ask it to do things. There'll be some interesting AI components, but check out the new interface is all rounded.
(07:28) This is very different. What sheets has been for now, more than a decade, right? We have rounded corners. This is like unheard of. In the Google sheet space, we have these pills, so they can be color coded. They are automatically pills. I have another video here about dropdown aggravations and how you can change those away from pills if you're like, oh my God, this stands out way too much.
(07:53) But it looks like these new added capabilities need to be, need to stand out because we need to know that this, it has more ca capabilities than just text in a cell, right? We want to know, okay, this is actually a link to the file, but also a link to all the details and data around that file. Very interesting updates to the Google Sheets interface.
(08:14) If you've noticed any yourself or you do end up having data extraction earlier than I do. Let me know and happy to discuss with you new and improved UI round sheets. Again, our sheet's, funny enough, with this new UI and it has this more bluish tint to it when we have selected, which is really nice actually.
(08:32) It makes it much easier to see what is selected, what is the active cell, what have I selected? It's very much higher contrast here. But our spreadsheets still black and white, and still the default is aerial, right? So everything inside of sheets that you're learning here at Better Sheets is so much still useful in addition to just the UI changes around the sheet.
(08:52) Again, this is to summarize, this is making Google Sheets fit in the Google Workspace much more seamlessly, right? So if you go to doc.new, this will have a similar interface up here. Get right? Yep. That pill shaped there and we know, okay, we are in the Google workspace. We're not only in Google Sheets and not only in Google Docs, we are now fully entrenched inside of Google Workspace.
(09:23) So yeah, really interesting. And then also, bringing all that data in and sharing that data. These apps is fairly new and really long waited. We knew, how Google Sheets should be able to speak with other Google sheets, right? Without having to do, import range. We're doing a lot of import range, right? And now we have access to these sheets very quickly, very easily.
(09:43) And it's apparent these are links to sheets and have more data extraction coming in. So yeah, the smart new smart canvas is interesting. I'm excited to see what, how AI is gonna. Get Interpretated and worked in and useful inside of sheets. We'll see. We'll see what happens. Thanks . So much for watching.
(10:00) Check out this video to make more money using Google sheets, you can sell Google sheet templates, Google sheet workflows, checklists. All kinds of things. Check out this video. And if you are looking to learn to code inside of Google sheets, check out this video, it is for existing programmers, but I think it also gives you a very quick introduction to what is possible inside of Google sheets.
(10:22) And maybe if you are like a sponge with information, you can catch on really quick, check out how to learn to code in Google sheets. If you're already an experienced programmer.