Google is today releasing a new update for Sheets that will enable you to visualize your data with ease. The previous update to Google Drive allowed users to use the Explore feature in Sheets, in which you could ask natural language questions about your data. With the new update, you can simply say “histogram for chocolate sales” and Sheets will automatically give you the histogram.
The technology that is enabling this new update is the same technology that was used to enable the Explore feature in September last year. While the previous version of Explore was capable of building graphs for you, this new update by Google also allows you to get graphs for your complete data set. Earlier, you could not get graphs in response to specific questions.
This new update also allows you to keep data from Sheets in sync with Docs and Slides. While you could previously update charts that you copied into Docs and Slides, you can now also update tables with just a click.
Other features of this new Google Sheets update include an enhanced printing experience — allowing you to specify the right margins and alignment on paper, a new chart-editing feature, new statistical functions including CHISQ.INV.RT, which returns the inverse of the right-tailed probability of the chi-squared distribution, GAMMADIST, F.TEST, and SORTN.
This update also offers support for new keyboard shortcuts that will now let you use commands like those used in Excel, overriding its previous inability to do so. Additionally, there is a new charts sidebar that will allow you to create 3D charts.
The update is also available on iPhones and iPads. While this new update is not very exciting, it is definitely going to help you be more time efficient. The Explore update has been a blessing, allowing users to simply ask for what they want instead of having to input complex algorithms. This customer friendly software and user friendly experience is what differentiates Google Sheets from other spreadsheet programs.
