Assisted Analysis in Sheets: Google's Formula Magic

I. Introduction

Google Workspace, previously known as g-suite, is a high-performing collaborative, smart and secure platform for all your needs, whether you have to shoot a mail from your end or schedule a meeting with anyone. Google Workspace has given us an ecosystem bubble where we do not need to skip and jump to different portals or applications to get our work done, keeping that in mind Google Workspace has its own set of productivity tools, Google Documents, Google Sheets and Google Slides.

Google Spreadsheets or Sheets is a part of Google Workspace productivity tool. It was first introduced in 2006 to few users on a first come first basis.

Over the years Spreadsheets have become a common go to platform to collaborate seamlessly, especially among teens and start-ups. Around the world in 2024,over 1,03,807 companies have started using Google Sheets as Office Suites tools.

Spreadsheets have become indispensable tools for organizing data, performing calculations, analyzing trends and delegating important work to colleagues. Google Sheets takes this functionality to the next level with its cloud-based accessibility and collaborative features. Now, with the rise of artificial intelligence (AI), Google Sheets is becoming an even more intelligent and efficient tool.

The Assisted Analysis on Google Sheets helps you to save time and also get your work done much quicker as it is able to pick up any of your old data input that you may have used before.

Formula acceleration saves time and reduces errors by surfacing relevant formulas as you type. It also helps you organize your spreadsheets and generate a table of contents for you based on your requirement. For example it can help you create a trip planner, event tracker, etc.

One of the most important parts of g-sheets is its compatibility with different platforms especially with Google Docs, Microsoft Word and excel. Google Spreadsheets supports almost all formats to generate your data.

II. What is Assisted Analysis?

Assisted analysis has been a part of Google Spreadsheets since last year but what is it? Assisted analysis is a function of g sheets that helps you save time and does wonders with repetitive tasks.

Whether you have to create a table of contents or assign some task to anyone or update the details of the sheet, all can be done through the help of assisted analysis. Since being born in the cloud and having AI assistance, all your data which you have inserted in the sheets at some point of time will be saved up, so next time when you maybe inserting that same name or data on the sheets, the sheets will automatically recall that part and suggest if you would like to insert that same data or not.

Need to suggest some work from the sheets or update the status of the project, you can do that through smart canvas from google sheets. Open up a sheet> insert @function and you will see a list of drop down buttons over there, select from the one that you would like to pin, whether that's a file, person or a meeting details.

Also known as smart chips, helps you in creating values for your dropdowns, you can insert the dropdown chips that are configured for common use cases like priority or review statuses. Once you've inserted the dropdown option, you can utilize the data validation sidebar to effortlessly tweak the choices or apply styling.

Sheets incorporates multiple modes of collaborating, ranging from the asynchronous—when collaborators work independently and mostly at different times, in the same file—to real-time simultaneous collaborative editing. With asynchronous editing, you can use the comment feature to notify people to questions or concerns and assign them tasks that they can mark complete when they finish them.

With the help of real time collaboration you and multiple members of your team can work together on the same file, for example you and your team members are working from different locations and different timelines, you want to update them about some project or get a status of it.

Click on the @function, select the drop down options, insert the name that you would want to pin and then select the type whether it's a note, link or comment.

Whether you are from the sales team or technical team, assisted analysis will help you navigate your work with ease, consuming very less manual effort.

Now say for example you have a sheet, the sheet contains almost 5,000 names with details and email conversations. You want to find out what was the last mail you had sent to MR./MRs. XYZ row number 532.

One of the ways is you check your mailbox or gmail labels and get the exact conversation but that's too much of a manual work.

Now click on the row that you want to view the details with, while hovering over that name or email id you will see a highlighted option called detailed view.

After clicking on the open detailed view option you will see a pop up open up on the right hand side, the right hand side view will give you the wholesome details of all the conversations, mail id, setting up a meeting or dropping a mail option from over there.

IV. Real-World Applications

Now say for example a restaurant or a fast food center wants to organize their reviews and rating data more easily. They will be able to recreate it with the help of Enhanced Smart Fill. Other than manually typing in data, ​​google sheets can detect a pattern in the existing ratings and reviews content, and suggest values for the remaining cells. You can review the suggestions and accept them in one click using Enhanced Smart Fill.

Sales teams could also use Enhanced Smart Fill to more easily organize the next steps in a sales cycle. Instead of manually extracting next steps from a column of unformatted notes, you can select the suggested next steps that Sheets will provide you based on the account information listed in other columns.

Or, let’s say you hosted a fundraiser or NGO event and want to customize thank you notes for your donors based on their donation type. Other than writing the notes one by one, you could quickly see a list of suggested thank you messages that Sheets generates based on the pattern of your first set of messages. Simply click to accept the suggested values so that you can quickly and efficiently thank the donors.

V. Potential Limitations and Future Considerations

Google Sheets or sheets has become a go to competitor of Excel being in the spreadsheet game. Since its inception in 1985 Microsoft Excel has been the go to platform for almost all the users and remains a powerful tool till date.

During the COVID 19 situation companies and organizations had to work separately and had to work from home or different locations, and Google Workspace being a cloud platform, it provided with seamless collaborative functionality, the ability to handle extremely huge and complicated projects and data sets through its integration with BigQuery, and the automation opportunities available through AppSheet.

While Excel and others also offer these capabilities, Google has made them so intuitive and end-user-friendly that even the most change-averse professionals can quickly get up to speed and start analyzing its benefits.

I have stated some of the features and usefulness of g sheets and as I have stated earlier, there are still some limitations in Sheets that are yet to be implemented or are different from its Excel counterpart.

Limitations:

• Google Sheets is not compatible with many of the plugins, or add-ins that Excel users have come to rely upon.
• Some of the functions and formulas available on excel are not available for sheets.
• Google Sheets can have about 10 million cells or 18,278 columns for spreadsheets that are created to sheets.
• When you try to convert a document to sheets and if any cells have 50,000 characters, those will be removed from sheets.

The future of Google Workspace and Google Sheets has a wide spectrum as Google is rolling out updates on a regular basis, changing its interface and also utility. In the last few months Google Sheets had a feature called xplore, which would help you create a database or analyze that data upfront within a small span of time and showcase you the charts and responses on the right hand side. Now with the introduction of AI in the techsphere all giants have started rolling out their version of AI assistance.

Google has introduced its Gemini AI which can help you write an email template, revert back over the mail or it can give you a summary of an article or piece of information. It can also attend meetings on your behalf and take notes for the same. It will also be able to create slides for the input that you may have inserted and also fetch data from your account.

The introduction of Gemini AI with ​Google Workspace accounts will make your life much easier and seamless as you would have to invest less time in taking care of all the steps.

VI. Conclusion

Google Sheets or spread sheets have come a long way and currently has become the prime competitor for Microsoft Excel. While both have their own benefits, Google is updating its features on a regular basis to give you a crisp and clean experience, whether you are working from different locations or working with a huge team you can collaborate with them seamlessly and an easy to use interface can help you get the best of your results. With Gemini AI also being introduced in the last few weeks you will have a chance to make your work much more creative and thorough and since it's built in the cloud you don't need to back up your data after every entry.