Google Sheets has a lot of advantages over other spreadsheet editing tools, including the fact that it's on the cloud, so you can access, view, and edit your spreadsheets no matter where you are.
Another less talked about advantage of Google Sheets is the tremendous selection of add-ons which you can find for it. These add-ons help you to accomplish all sorts of things that wouldn’t otherwise be possible with Google Sheets. So, here are eight of the most vital Google Sheets add-ons for better spreadsheets.
1. Merge Sheets
First on this list comes Merge Sheets, a Google Sheets add-on that does about what you might expect from the name. It allows you to merge different Google Sheets.
If you find yourself with two or more Google Sheets that you want to condense into one, then you’ll find that there’s no good solution with Google Sheets’ innate functionality. Instead, you’ll need an add-on like this one.
However, what makes Merge Sheets unique is how it lets you go about doing just that. Merge Sheets supports two different forms of combining sheets, STACK and JOIN.
STACK combines your sheets into a new sheet, one after the other. This means that you can quickly and easily combine your data, but not always in the way you might want. It only keeps headers for the first sheet, for example.
JOIN is a little more complex, but gives you greater flexibility in how you join your sheets. It links your tables by a common field. Merge Sheets tries to detect the best match, and if you set your settings up right, this should let you combine multiple sheets however you want.
2. Form Mule – Email Merge Utility
Next on this list comes Form Mule, a Google Sheets add-on that allows you to convert Google Sheets to emails.
These emails can be both targeted and personalized, and are built entirely from the information in your Google Sheets. You can do this manually if you want, though there are also options through an automatic timer and on form submit.
Form Mule comes with a number of other unique functions as well. It features an email template editor that helps to make template creation easy and the capacity for up to ten different email templates based on different sending conditions.
3. Copy Down
If you’re looking to actually expand on the functionality of your spreadsheets themselves, then Copy Down might just be the add-on that you’ve been looking for.
Copy Down is an add-on for Google Sheets which adds a completely new function to the service. If you’re using Google Sheets, which are basing their information off of Google Forms, then you might notice that the data in your spreadsheets change in a way that you don’t want it to.
Copy Down fixes that. It allows you to have formulae and cell formats carry into new form submission rows. This enables you to have spreadsheets auto-calculate new information based on form submissions, perform lookups against other sheets, and more.
4. Autocrat
Next up on this list is Autocrat, a document merge tool available for Google Sheets. If you’re looking for better ways to share your Google Sheets, then this add-on might just be what you’re looking for.
Autocrat at its core allows you to take data from a spreadsheet within Google Sheets and then merge it into a document. It does this using a template, which you can control and define.
You can select which fields you want to be included in the document and how you want to format them. For instance, you can choose to enter certain spreadsheet fields into your produced document as a hyperlink.
If you want one big document for all your data or smaller ones for individual pieces of your spreadsheet, that’s possible, too. If you want to share your documents easily, you have the option of sending them directly via email. You can also download the file yourself to do whatever you want with it, if you so wish.
5. AppSheet
AppSheet is an interesting add-on in that it allows your Google Sheets to become more than they’ve ever been before. AppSheet does this by allowing you to turn Google Sheets spreadsheets into apps.
AppSheet’s approach is entirely code-free, so anyone can use it regardless of prior knowledge. All you need to do is use the add-on with a pre-existing Google Sheets spreadsheet, and you’ll be taken to the app creation screen.
This screen features an active preview of your app as you work through development. You can adjust the views, information, and more.
Deploying is easy as well. AppSheet checks that your app will function correctly when deployed, and then all you need to do is distribute it. You can do this via links and emails.
6. EZ Query
Next up is EZ Query. EZ Query is a simple add-on which helps to make spreadsheets more easily readable. EZ Query accomplishes this by allowing you to effortlessly query existing spreadsheets for just the information that you need. The data is all based off of the existing spreadsheet, so will always be up to date.
7. Sort Range Plus
Sort Range Plus is, as the name implies, a Google Sheets add-on which aims to expand on the existing functionality of the Sort Range tool already available.
It does this by adding the ability to color-code your data to Google Sheets, and then allows you to sort your rows by cell background color and text color. By default, you’re only able to do this with cell value, so this provides a lot of additional options.
8. Crop Sheet
Finally, we have Crop Sheet. This Google Sheets add-on adds a completely new function to the service, which is cropping your spreadsheets. By default, you would have to manually delete extraneous rows and columns entirely by yourself. Crop Sheet automates this service by allowing you to just crop a sheet down to what you want to use.
You can do this by either selecting what you want to keep, or by entering the data manually. Either way, the add-on will reduce your spreadsheet down to just what you want.
Google Sheets Add-Ons Are Just the Beginning
As you can see, there are a lot of different ways that you can expand on Google Sheets’ existing functionality. No doubt there’s something here that you’ve found to benefit you, as there are always more efficient ways to be using Google Sheets.
With so many options in automation and formulae available, Google Sheets truly is a powerful tool in the right hands. Knowing how to use it to its fullest potential, however, is a completely different story.