Five little Google Sheets tricks to save you time on basic spreadsheets

I was recently working remotely with my father and I realized how many time-saving shortcuts he thinks I agree with. These are not advanced formulas or pivot tables; just simple tricks to save you time if you work with basic organizational spreadsheets. Some of these are old Excel tricks; but some even mine Virgin colleagues discovered only recently.

Easily rearrange rows and columns by swiping from row number

If you want to reorder a row, you can do it in one step by first clicking the row number to highlight the row, then clicking and dragging from the row number easily insert it wherever you want.

Before I learned this trick from my partner, who (full disclosure) was a Google Docs product manager once, I’m embarrassed to admit that I wasted a lot of time rearranging things by first inserting a blank line, then dragging the content into that new space and, finally, the erasure of its old row. Don’t do that.

Start a new Google spreadsheet by typing “foi.nou“In your browser.

Google has a top-level “.new” domain, so it also works for docs.new, slides.new, cal.new, etc. They have started allowing other websites to use the domain in 2019; so Spotify has playlist.new, Medium has story.new etc.

Quickly resize columns to fit content by double-clicking between column headers

This is as easy as it sounds – if you want the width of the column to automatically resize at the shortest or longest entry, just double-click between the column headers. This also works in Excel.

Paste something in clear formatting with Command + Shift + v on Mac or Ctrl + Shift + v on PC

I’m pulling data about The Verge from a lot of different sources, which have all their own fonts and styles, so this trick comes in handy. By using Command + Shift + v instead of Command + v on your Mac Ctrl + Shift + v instead of Ctrl + v on your computer, you can peel off the old font and font size as you paste and enter plain text.

You can also paste simple values ​​by double-clicking a cell before pasting, but this is a bit more cumbersome. To delete formatting from multiple cells at once, highlight them first and then use Command + on Mac or Ctrl + on the computer. There is a your several keyboard shortcuts like this, which Google catalogs here.

Add multiple hyperlinks to a cell

This is more of a PSA – for a long time, you could only hyperlink whole cells. My colleague Jay Peters recently discovered that this is no longer the case; now you can add as many links as you want. Just click in the cell and highlight the word or phrase you want to hyperlink before adding the links.

If you have other favorite Google Sheet tricks you want to share, leave a comment! And because I used my siblings’ parents and cats for my data sample, here’s my cat, Olivia, hitting one of her signature pictures.