Hi Reader,

Welcome to the Google Sheets Tips newsletter #268, your Monday morning espresso, in spreadsheet form!

The school holidays are ending soon for those of us in the northern hemisphere.

I've had a fantastic summer break with my family making memories but I'm ready for school to start.

I'm excited to get back into a work groove.

But I'm keenly aware of the fact that I only have a limited number of summers with my children.

Parenting, and life, is a balancing act!

One more thing...

You can't go 5 minutes without mention of Artificial Intelligence tools these days.

I'm spending most of my (limited) work time at the moment using them. I want to understand how they can help us as Sheets users.

Starting this week, I'm sharing an AI + Sheets tip with you.

Find the first one below, under the regular Google Sheets tip.

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➜ News

There were a couple of new features added to Sheets recently:

I.
Bulk conversion for place chips in Google Sheets lets you convert a range of links into place chips in one go. Place chips allow you to open location directly in Google Maps and show a preview in a popup in your Sheet.

II.
Pre-fill feature for dropdown chips lets you use cell data to pre-fill the dropdown values, a great time save.

Source for both: Google Workspace Updates Weekly Recap​

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➜ Google Sheets Tip #268: Quickly select rows or columns

A nice quick tip for you today.

Use these shortcuts to efficiently select rows or columns. Super handy when you want to perform an operation on a whole row or column (e.g. format the row a certain way, insert rows above or below, delete the row, etc.).

Rows

Shift + Space bar

Quickly select a whole row with this shortcut, so you can apply formatting for example, or move it up or down.

Note: if you use this shortcut when your cursor is inside or next to a filled data range, it will only highlight the row within that range. Press it again to extend to the whole row.

Columns

Ctrl + Space bar

Select a whole column quickly with the shortcut Ctrl + Space bar.

Note: if you use this shortcut when your cursor is inside or next to a filled data range, it will only highlight the column within that range. Press it again to extend to the whole column.

Learning shortcuts properly is a great investment of time that will have tremendous ROI over the long run.

Interestingly, shortcuts were the subject of the very first edition of this newsletter!

(Wow, that was 5 years ago! It's fun to see how this newsletter has evolved in that time.)

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➜ Sheets + AI Tip #1

Artificial Intelligence (AI) tools are all the rage at the moment.

But are they actually helpful to us as Sheets users?

In this new section of the newsletter, I want to share practical tips for what you can do with AI today to help you with your Sheets work.

If you haven't tried using AI yet, I encourage you to signup for Open AI's ChatGPT and/or Google Bard and give it a shot.

Try it with today's tip:

Use AI to explain formulas

Formulas are notoriously difficult to understand.

They are rarely documented and often look like a blob of undecipherable functions and cell references.

It takes ages to pick them apart and understand what's going on.

This is where AI comes in. We can use AI tools like ChatGPT or Bard to explain formulas to us. They do a great job, even with complex formulas like this one:

Do you currently use AI tools with Google Sheets?

I'd love to hear how you use AI in your Sheets workflows.

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If you enjoyed this newsletter, please forward it to a friend who might enjoy it.

Have a great week!

Cheers,
Ben

P.S. Low on cyan​