How to Use Google Sheets - Beginner's Guide

everyone in today's how-to video I want to show you how to use Google sheets if you're a beginner to Google sheets or if you're coming from other platforms like Microsoft Excel and Google sheets is part of Google drive's and part of Google G Suites and Google sheets is free to use is a spreadsheet program and he lives online so you don't have to download any type of software you could just access it on the Internet and the easiest way to access Google sheets is to go to drive.google.com which will bring you inside of Google Drive now Google Drive is basically the way all the different sheets and all the different types of Google products get stored online so think of it as more like a digital hard drive and I have a different video explaining Google Drive and the different products that live inside of Google Drive like Google Docs and Google slides and Google Forms this video is focused on Google sheets one of those products inside of Google Drive so once you go to the drive website just sign into your Google account and if you don't have one just go ahead and create one from scratch it's very simple and to create a Google sheet inside of Google drive's just press the little plus sign here and go ahead and go down to Google sheets and click it there's also an option if you go over here to this arrow to create from templates in this video I'm going to show you how to do blank spreadsheets if you go to the template page and if you go to the general tab over here you could choose from a lot of different templates like if you're using Google sheets to make invoices or track time or to do expense reports you can start using these templates and not creating from scratch and there's a whole bunch more over here like to-do lists and things like that so maybe explore this page to see if something catches your attention in my case I'm gonna close this and I'm gonna start from scratch so Google sheet I'll just click it and the first thing we typically want to do with any Google product that we open up is title it so right now it's untitled spreadsheet I'll call this annual budget you could store it and that will make it one of your favorites inside your Google Drive so it'd be a little easier to find and what I do next is I press move right here this little folder I can't click it and what this does is instead of just putting it somewhere randomly in your Google Drive you could choose where it ends up so typically I like to press this little folder icon and call this whatever I want and that will be the name of that folder and I'll press the checkmark and now that folder is opened up and I could move that document here so when I go to my Google Drive later I'll know exactly where my Google sheets documents are I do this with any type of document I creates inside of Google Drive now before we start filling this out and going over the details here there's also another option on the bottom of the page and it's the sheets here so right now we made a Google sheets document but underneath that you could have multiple different sheets inside of the same document so right now by default there's just sheet 1 so I could click this little arrow down here and I could rename this document so maybe this is called budget summary and I'll press ENTER but if I wanted to have other pages to this document I could press the plus sign and add a sheet here and maybe this sheet I could rename to January so if I wanted to do monthly budget breakdowns I could do that by having many sheets here and the main one will be my summary that's how you create multiple sheets but you don't have to you could just have one sheet which is what I'm gonna do in this case and I'll just work on the main sheet here let me kind of just give you overview of what you're looking at on this page on the very top you have ABCD you have the alphabet here basically that represents your columns now columns go from top to bottom so if I just click one I selected this is column a all this is part of column a and then on the left side you have numbers 1 through as many as you like so you could keep going to infinity here but if I select one you can see now this is selected and that's called a row so inside of Google sheets you have columns which go top to bottom and you have rows which go left and right and these individual boxes here the one you see selected in blue that's called a cell so sells rows and columns make up a Google sheet and later on when you have a really busy sheet and you want to know for example which cell is this how do I refer to this cell you start with the column letter so B and then the row number so 9 so this cell will be benign now when you get more advanced and use formulas it is very handy to know which cell you're in what's the name of that cell and that's how you find out name of the column first and the number of the row I'll go ahead and select this and press Delete now inside of any one of these cells here you could have numbers you could have formulas you could have words you could have sentences pretty much anything you could think of could fit inside of these so for example I'll just call this budget that will become my title and I could go ahead and press ENTER and it'll bring me down a row this will become my title and then typically over here you would want to put the different things that will go on these different cells so in my case my expenses would go over here and then I could name all my expenses down the list below and then this will be my monthly cost for that expense I could put that underneath that and then maybe my yearly cost would go over here and then we'll use some formulas to make things a little bit simpler now one thing to note is if you write a sentence that's too long this is a longer sentence that looks like it's going into the other column here you see that is too long for column D and if I just click away here it looks like it's part of column e now but it's not if I select column E and I typed here column D is still intact and all those words or numbers or whatever you put here is still part of it so you have long sentences here and it's not going to disappear it's still the whole value still there and anytime if you click one of these columns under this FX tab right here you could see the full sentence or the entire number over here if you wanted to see what was on the cell if you want to make it more organized on any of these you could grab the little arrow right here so if you just go to the side of any of these walls hit this blue arrow you could drag and click to make these different sizes you could do this with rows too so if I want Row two to be a little bit bigger I could just go ahead and grab it and do it this way you could always double click over here to and it will just Auto resize it for you so you could read the whole thing if you don't want to manually change the size and here let me put for example for expenses rent goes here and then the monthly cost for rent let's say is $1,500 out put in 1500 here and I'll press tab this time and yearly cost we'll go ahead and use calculations when we get into the formula section so instead of me doing the math of figuring out what's 1500 times 2 I'll kind of show you how we're gonna let Google sheets handle that for us and I'll go ahead and select these two and delete these and just one more thing I'll show you before I fill out the rest of this page if you type a word here if you press ENTER it moves you down on the column so it moves you down one but if you press tab it moves you over on the row so it's a fast way to get around by pressing tab to move left and right and pressing enter to move down I'll go ahead and fill out the rest of this budget so we have some numbers to work with and we'll get to the next step okay so I put more items on this here so we have more to work with and typically what we next want to do after we put in our numbers is we just want to do some basic formatting so things are a little bit easier to read so typically we want to change our title so it's usually on a one where you put your title here you want to select this and you want to change the formatting so I'll go ahead and select it and over here is all your formatting options that you could work with let me just make this page slightly bigger here and I'll go ahead and I want to make this bold and I'll just change the size here to be 18 so it's much bigger than it was before and I want this to spread out actually so I want it to be a little bit bigger but right now I can't do it because it's just in the cell but I want it to be across these three different boxes these three different cells so while it's selected all I have to do is drag these three different cells I just click my mouse and drag these three now that three are highlighted and now I could go over here to this drop down to merge so if I select this mrs. merge all click that and it turns all those cells into one big cell you see how these little gray walls disappeared so now if I select this budget I could Center this easily and to do that I would just come over here to the horizontal alignment I'll click it and I'll press the center option before if I did that you would have just Center it in this box and not all three boxes next time I'm gonna click here and drag on these three boxes and I'll go ahead and make these bold but this time let me change the color so I'll change the color you could change the color of the text by pressing the a option here or the color of the background which is what I want to do here so also like this and I'll go ahead and make it green and that's selected these three and made them green now if you want to do the whole row just select the whole row from here just press the number you could do it with columns too and then you could go ahead and press that color green and it'll do this whole row now if I just scroll over here you can see all the way to Z is green if you ever make a mistake - there's edits and redo and undo so let me undo that in this case you could explore more of formatting up here all your options is laid out right in the center now if you want to add symbols to these so these are supposed to be dollars and I really want a dollar sign but I'm not gonna go manually type in a dollar sign I'll just click this column here to select everything that's ever gonna be on this column and up here I'm gonna press the formatting option and pick currency and I get the dollar sign and the right formatting for it being dollars you also have that with percentages and others here anytime with rows columns or these individual cells and boxes you could go ahead and select them so let me select an entire row row 12 you could right click right over here and you could delete entire rows here you could hide entire rows or you could add rows below and above so if I insert one above it adds a clear roll on top of the one I was stun that one comes in really handy especially if you forget to put things in order you could just add rows or columns by right-clicking on it and adding left or right on columns or below and above on rows and you could always also click and copy an entire row as well so you could just go ahead and copy an entire row go to a different row and then right-click on it I've pasted that role as well so that will paste the same row so if you want to duplicate different rows or columns and this works with individual cells too but in this case I'll select this role and I'll just press Delete to delete the content of the row and let me go ahead and select this row and instead of deleting that we'll just delete the content I'll go ahead and remove this by right-clicking on it and I'll go ahead and delete this entire row this time and it'll move the other row up another useful option is sorting so if you come up to data here this menu you could sort your entire sheet alphabetically you could also do this for a range so let me just choose sort sheet a to Z I'll select it and you can see it turned my entire thing from B all the way to W and it put out alphabetically in these rows now the only problem is he also took my title bar and put it over here which is not what I want so let me go ahead and undo that and the other option is basically you could select what you want to be sorted alphabetically so I just selected everything here and I could go to data and I could sort alphabetically by range also like that and it took everything I selected undid it alphabetically without using this green row because I didn't select that row and the reason why I selected both of these is because I want these numbers to move but still stay on the same row as the actual expense here if I just did this row it would have changed it but these numbers would I got all mixed up so typically you want to just select the text and the numbers together like this when sorting now let's get into formulas or functions one of the most useful things inside of any spreadsheet program so let me just start with a very simple function of adding so let's say I had a number 50 over here and I had a number 86 over here and I had a number 54 over here and I want to add these together so instead of using a calculator app or doing this in my head I could use what's called a function inside of Google sheets so I want the results to go here so I'll select this cell and I'll come up here to the functions tab some people refer to it as formulas and select this little down arrow and I want to choose sum which is just adding these numbers that I'm gonna choose I'm gonna select that and look at what it does it puts a formula for me the equal sign sum and parentheses inside of those parentheses are the numbers I want to end so I could select one of them and then drag to select the other two and let go and you could see daddy added those for me and if I press ENTER you just add these three for me and let me go ahead and select this and press Delete another way you could do it is again I'll go over here and do some you could select one and then while you're holding the you get the same result but if the numbers weren't in different places shift might be another solution instead of dragging anytime you could select a cell that has a formula and then go up here to the FX menu here and see what that formula was that was added in this case I'm gonna delete pretty much everything I added I just wanted to show you one of the simplest formulas in any spreadsheet program which is the sum function to add multiple numbers so let's use it in the case for our example let's say we want to see how much we're spending every month so we need to add all this so I'll come down here this is gonna be our total and I'll make this bold and I'll come to this box this is where our total number is gonna go so again the sum function is gonna work I'll come over here press sum and this time I'll click this box and drag the rest of these boxes and let go and press Enter so now it took everything that I put all these values and added them together here now I'll show you how to do one of these manually because these work manually as well so I'll come over here to yearly cost and this time we want to know that our $120 a month car insurance how much is that going to be per year well we just need to do this 120 times 12 and we're gonna use the function up here so I'll select it and typically starts with an equal sign so you just type in the equal sign and this time we'll just do a manually so this cell is b3 so I know this b3 I'll type in b3 and I'll do the multiply option here which is shift eight the little asterisk symbol and I want to do this times twelve so I'll type in times twelve and press Enter and you just took 120 times twelve if I select this box I could see my formula up here so b3 which was this box I just found that from my column and row and then twelve I typed it manually and that gave me multiplication now instead of doing this for all these look at this little cool trick here I could grab this box here and drag it all the way down and let go and he just created all those difference formulas for me automatically so eighteen hundred if I selected it just added be five times 12 so this box times twelve and this box times twelve got me for twenty all these numbers were automatically calculated by just doing this now you could do this with dates too so if I type in one one twenty twenty two press Enter I could select this box and I could grab this blue box on the corner and drag it down and it just adds the dates for me automatically it just didn't duplicate this date it added the dates from that date very useful option when it comes to formulas and numbers and dates now one of the main reasons that you use formulas is not just to do the math for you but it's basically reserving that formula so if my car insurance amount changes let's say it becomes 150 all I have to do is change that monthly cost press ENTER and you see the math change to eighteen hundred so I don't have to ever do that formula again it stays intact in my Google sheets all your formulas across all your sheets stay intact so if the initial values that you type in change you don't have to figure out the formula or the output again and again now let's get to sharing and saving so by default everything gets saved on your Google Drive you don't have to ever press save like you do with software's that you've downloaded on your computer but you could come to the file option and you could actually make a copy if you don't want to alter the copy you're working on and you could download it and you could download as a PDF or as a Microsoft Excel document you can't be downloaded as a Google sheets document because that lives on this website but all these other documents are available you also have version history too so you could name your current version and then work on another one and you could email it as an attachment but one of my favorite ways to work on anything inside of Google Drive is press share go ahead and click this and here all you have to do is add people just typing their email here and then you could go ahead and work on this document at the same time or just get comments from them so for example I just type someone's email here and I want to give them different permissions here so in this case I could basically make him an editor so they could work on this at the same time I'm working on if we want to do that I could let them comment so they could use the comment function up here or they could just view if I want to let people view it but not really alter or comment on it and I would just choose that permission over here first then I will make sure they're gonna be notified with the email and type my message my documents already being shared and I'll go ahead and press send collaborations are sharing especially when everybody could edit the same document when they have permission is one of the most powerful tools inside of any Google Drive product and that's the beginner's guide to Google sheets obviously it's a lot more advanced than the formulas could get really in-depth but I really wanted to give you a good overall introduction to Google sheets again watch the other videos on Google drive's and Google Docs and really get yourself familiar with using those Google products I'll put everything in links below this video thanks so much for watching and I hope to catch you next time

Channel: Howfinity

Views: 183,825

Keywords: how to use google sheets, howfinity, how to, tutorials, google sheets, google sheets tutorial, google sheets tutorial for beginners, how to use google spreadsheet, google sheets for beginners, google drive, google sheets formulas, google sheet, google spreadsheet tutorial for beginners, How to use google sheets for business, google sheet tutorial, using google sheets

Id: Rus4buFP_a4

Length: 19min 32sec (1172 seconds)

Published: Mon Jun 08 2020