MacMost Now 856: Google Drive Spreadsheets

Google Drive spreadsheets is a good alternative to using desktop apps like Excel and Numbers. It is a fairly sophisticated number crunching program that has all of the major features seen in those others. All you need is to use your web browser and a free Google account.

Video Transcript: Hi this is Gary with MacMost Now. On today's episode let's take a look at Goggle Spreadsheets.
Goggle Spreadsheets are web based spreadsheets. An alternative to using Numbers or Excel. If you don't have either of these two programs and you only need to make a new spreadsheet every once in a while you may want to look into using Goggle Spreadsheets.
You can find Goggle Spreadsheets by going to drive.goggle.com. Goggle drive is what took over for Goggle docks. They are the same they just changed the name. You need a Goggle account to be able to use it. Of course if you have a gmail account, that's a Goggle account. So most people have this.
So you go to drive.goggle.com and once you are in here you can see all your documents and you will see a create button. Click the create button and you want to go to Spreadsheet to create a new spreadsheet.
Now the goggle drive spreadsheets look just like any other spreadsheets. You've got cells, you've got rows, you've got columns. You can click on a cell. You can enter a number in, you can enter another number. You can do formulas by starting with an equal sign and then either using cell names like A1 plus, or you can actually click to get the cell name, click on B1 there, and you get the results.
The results update in real time. So I can change a number here and you can see it changed there in the formula result.
You have lots of different formatting options here. Some basic ones like you can make the cell bold for instance. You can change its font size if you want. Text colors, styles, fill colors, borders, all sorts of things. You can insert comments. There is some charting ability. There is filtering. There is all sorts of different things you can do. You can copy and paste between cells and do just all the basic stuff. 
You can see in the Menu items here how to insert things, how to change things, how to sort. A lot of different things that you can do.
One of the cool things is you don't need to save it at all just like with Mac stuff. You can basically just close that tab there and you can see there is the untitled spreadsheet. I can go into it here. It will reopen again. I can make a change, let's change this to 2 there, and I can close the window. If I go to untitled spreadsheet again you can see it remembered. So it is basically saving on the fly.
Let's open a spreadsheet I'd created previously here with some basics and let's see how we can do some things. I've got some headings here so let's go and make those bold. We can set the fill color with something so we can see those as headings. We can change styles as well. So we can select this or select the entire column here and let's set it to be dollars right there. 
Then we can create formulas, like that. See the cost and the total inventory of this item. We can copy and then I can select several cells and paste. We can format that cell as dollars as well.
If I wanted to make a chart I can select some area in here and just tap the chart button. It will try to guess what kind of chart I want. That is not exactly what I want there because I don't want the price in there. So I'll do some manual editing here to just do rows A and C. You can see then it gives me what I want there. So a lot of different things you can do to play around with it. 
I can do the pie chart, some interesting things. I can hit insert and then now this is actually something here that is in the spreadsheet that I can move around and do different things with.
You can do lots of different functions as well. For instance I can do sum and select a range here, and then get a sum there that updates. There is a ton of different functions. You can see some of them here. Some of the more common ones. But we can also go and take a look at all the documentation and see actually a ton of different functions. Pretty much all the standard ones for spreadsheets.
As you can imagine this is a pretty deep tool. Just about any spreadsheet is. There is a ton of different things that you can do and a ton of different functionalities. So if you are into spreadsheets you might want to go and check it out.
If you are not into spreadsheets but just need to manipulate some numbers every once in a while then using Goggle drive for this could be a cheaper way than buying a spreadsheet program.
Also, of course, another advantage of using the Goggle drive is the sharing ability. You can create a spreadsheet and share it amongst other people so you can collaborate on some work or just share your results.
I hope you found this useful. Until next time, this is Gary with MacMost Now.

Comments: 3 Responses to “MacMost Now 856: Google Drive Spreadsheets”

Dr. Jacqui Cyrus

11 years ago

Hi:
Thanks for sharing. I will share this tutorial with my undergraduate students.

-j-

Karen Mathis

Love MacMost! This is another helpful tool I hadn't used before. Thanks!
KM

John C Stires

I'm afraid of allowing Google to have access to my data. Period.

Comments Closed.

MacMost Now 856: Google Drive Spreadsheets

Comments: 3 Responses to “MacMost Now 856: Google Drive Spreadsheets”

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