In today’s software market there are a number of applications that are widely used on most PCs around the world. A good part of these refer to the growing office sector. Here we can find programs from the Microsoft Word or Excel category, those that make up the LibreOffice suite, or Google Docs and Sheets.
In the beginning and for many years, perhaps the programs that make up Microsoft Office have been the most widely used and extended in this sense. But with the passage of time the competition is getting tougher for, for example, the aforementioned Word and Excel from the giant Microsoft. In fact, this is precisely the case that we are going to talk about in these lines. And as you probably already know, Office is a paid suite, but we have interesting free alternatives at our disposal.
What is Google Sheets and what advantages does it offer
An example is the case in which we will focus on these lines, a program owned by Google. In the event that you are regular users of Microsoft Excel to perform spreadsheets, this will surely interest you. The mentioned spreadsheets are programs focused on working with numerical data that are used in both personal and professional settings.
Well, we will tell you all this because we will talk about Google Sheets , the free alternative to Microsoft Excel. That is one of its main advantages, that we can use the program for free, without paying a single euro, unlike Excel. In addition, as with the rest of Google’s office proposals, we use this application online. That means that we can work with Sheets directly from our favorite web browser. For this we only need a Google account and access its official website .
Therefore, from here we will have the opportunity to access the program as such and start working with our spreadsheets.
Launch of the Google spreadsheet program
To say that before being able to see the main interface of the application on screen, Sheets suggests that we make use of one of its multiple free templates . These are elements that we can use as an alternative to blank documents, so it can save us a lot of time.
Advantages of templates in Sheets
If you do not know what we are talking about, it is important to know that these templates we are talking about are pre-designed spreadsheets. There are many that we can choose from, and they refer to a good number of different themes. Of course they are free, and they will save us both time and effort. We will see some samples, while we can do a search for new ones from the box that we see at the top of the window.
Therefore, when starting the program, if we click on the Template Gallery button, we access the predesigned contents of this type that we can use. These are cataloged by type of use or work environment, so we recommend that you take a look at them. It is also interesting to know that on the Internet we can find many more samples of this type.
Obviously, once the sample that interests us has been selected, we will have to customize it afterwards and adapt it to our needs.
Start working on Sheets from scratch
But as we mentioned before, as it could not be otherwise, the program also offers us the possibility to start working on a blank document. Say that in this case we are going to find the usual user interface of these programs. That is, specifically we mean that we find an interface full of thousands of cells ready to start receiving data. This is perhaps the best and most efficient way to work with numerical data and formulas , as we will discover with use.
These, as usual in these programs, are named based on the letters and numbers of their rows and columns. In turn these can be resized by dragging their edges with the mouse to adapt them to our needs. Similarly, at the top of the program interface, we see the corresponding menus to use the program.
Work with all kinds of multimedia content
As we have previously mentioned, this is an application especially indicated for dealing with numerical data, but it is not only limited to that. We say this because in parallel Sheets allows us to include other components in the spreadsheet to enrich it. Here we refer to elements such as photos , graphics, drawings , forms, etc.
As it is easy to imagine, all this will be very helpful to us as complementary elements for our numerical projects. Well, at this point we will tell you that these objects are available to us from the Insert menu of the main interface of the program. Here we will only have to choose what we are interested in working with, to later customize the type of content .
The use of functions and formulas, key in the program
But of course, if the data that we enter or add in an additional way is important in a spreadsheet, the formulas or functions cannot be missing. All this will allow us in the most efficient way with all the data we deal with here. There are simple formulas that refer to basic operations , and more complex ones for professional tasks. Be that as it may, Google Sheets itself does everything possible to facilitate our work with all of this.
First, we will find them categorized by their mode of operation in the mentioned Insert / Function menu. In turn, another list of the categories we are talking about will be displayed here. Among these we find those related to finance, logic, date , engineering, mathematics, matrices, etc.
Other Basic Sheets Features
But of course, as it happens in the Microsoft program to which we referred to you, Sheets also offers us all the basic options of office work . In this way we can format the entered texts and numerical data, change fonts and sizes, correct spelling, align paragraphs, eliminate duplicate elements, etc.
All this will allow us to have greater control over the spreadsheets that we create or edit from this Google program.
