7 useful Google Sheet Tips for Business Owners – Business Automation

Google Sheets are gaining a lot of popularity among business owners which helps them to easily manage their data and create complex reports in just a few minutes. It has simplified common spreadsheet tasks, saving a lot of time. The Features and benefits derived from this are innumerable. In this particular blog, I am going to share seven Google Sheet tips that a lot of people would be unaware of and can help in data sharing and management in a better way.

These Google Sheet tips are very useful for business owners to deal with large amounts of confidential data in a secure way.

What are the 7 useful Google Sheet tips?

Here you go, one by one:

1. Access Rights & Restrictions: A lot of times, we want to share a Google Sheet with our teammates but we don't know, should we share the editing rights or should we share it as a viewer. They get confused about whether the teammate will be able to download the data, will they be able to share it further? 

How can you restrict your teammates from doing the same? Let's see how, in the Google Sheet, there's a button on the top right corner called ‘Share’ which shows it's only private to me. 

On clicking, it opens the option of sharing with people and groups. Now, this is where you write the email address of your teammates, and when you do that, it gives, you three types of sharing rights:

1. Viewer: Your teammates can view it but they cannot edit it. 
2. Commenter: They can make a comment on any of the cells in which they want to make some changes. 
3. Editor: If you want your teammate to make changes in the Google Sheet.

Further, with each and every type of sharing right, there's a setting button at the top. 

For example, if you share it as a viewer where you will get an option that viewers and commenters can download, print, and copy. If you disable this option, your teammates will not be able to download, print or copy the Google Sheets, making it secured for you.

If you share it as an editor, then the editor gets the right to change the permissions and can share it with others. If you want to restrict that teammate from further sharing, then you uncheck this as well. 

1. Google Sheet offline: Now, think if you're working on a Google Sheet and the internet goes off, what will happen next? Can you and your teammates work on Google Sheet offline? 

Yes, you can use Google Sheets even without the internet. For that, click on the File tab in the main header menu, and select the option ‘Make available offline. 

Now, when you click on this, it changes the status of all Google documents from online to offline. So, when offline, it will save that data on the laptop, and once you get the internet connectivity back, it syncs that offline data to the Google Cloud. 

So, if you want to work without the internet, make sure you switch on this option even before the internet goes off. 

1. Version History: A lot of business owners don’t know that it is possible to track the changes made on a sheet by their teammates. Google offers an amazing feature called Version History, where you can track all the changes made by you or your teammates. 

But, how to use it? Look at the right side of the tab  ‘Help’, it shows, ‘The last edit was xx minutes ago and if you hover on it, it shows ‘Open version history’. 

It will show you all the changes made by your teammates either today or yesterday, a day before yesterday, or even one week before. And when you see other versions here, you click on any of the versions to restore it.

So, for example, if your teammate deletes the data, you can check the previous versions to take the data back again. 

1. Create Google Form from existing Google Sheet: You can directly connect a Google Form with Google Sheet. But what if you're already having a Google Sheet and you want to insert a Google Form in that, how will you do the same? How can you create a Google Form from an existing Google Sheet? 

In your existing Google Sheet, click on the tab  ‘Tools’, you will get an option ‘Create a form’.

Now, when you click on that, it opens a Google form with an alert, ‘New form created, add your questions here. So when you click here, it opens a new Google form altogether which you have created from a Google Sheet itself.

You can add the desired questions in the form.

Now, go back to the previous spreadsheet, you will see a new sheet automatically added to it named ‘Form Responses 1’ which is connected to the Form.

Now, try filling up the form by previewing it and you will see that the sheet will automatically capture all the data filled in the form on submission.

1. Copy a Spreadsheet: How to copy a spreadsheet from one Google Sheet to another Google Sheet?

For example, if you have two workbooks and you want to copy one sheet to another worksheet, you need to right-click on the sheet name, it shows the option called ‘Copy to’ and hovering on it gives two options - either a new spreadsheet or existing spreadsheet.

 So when you click on Existing Spreadsheet, you click on Recent, it will show you all the Google Sheets, which you are already having in your Google Drive.

Select the Google Sheet you want to copy it in and it will start copying the worksheet to a different sheet in that file altogether.

Move Google Sheet to folder: A lot of times when we create Google Sheets, it all gets scattered in our Google Drive and we are not able to find out which Google Sheet is in which folder. Now, how can you move Google Sheet to any specific folder in Google Drive?

Follow these steps:

1. Go to the tab ‘File’ from the menu bar.
2. It will show an option ‘Move’. Click on it.
3. It will open Google Drive and that's where you see all the folders, so you can select any of the folders by scrolling on it and click on Move here and your Google Sheet will move to that particular folder.

1. Re-align columns in Google sheets: 

Whenever we fill a google form with a set of questions, the responses get filled in the Google sheet attached to it in the same order of questions. But, Sometimes we need the responses to be in some other order for comparison or some other reason. Is that possible?

Yes, it can simply be done without re-aligning the questions in the form. What you have to do is simply drag that column by selecting from its header and position it wherever you want. The order of responses will change in the sheet without any change in the form.

You can realign your columns based on your requirement and the data will be picked from Google Forms in the same way that it was picked up before you realigned the columns. 

Follow these seven tips to efficiently use Google Sheets in your business. It will definitely help you save your time and efforts at the same time giving you data security & easy data management.

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