Google Sheets just got a major overhaul powered by Gemini that uses AI to analyze data faster and automatically turn your spreadsheets into charts.
After announcing the update in January, Google rolled out Sheets' new AI-powered capabilities to all Workspace business users on Friday.
With this update, you can use Gemini's capabilities to comb through your data and instantly generate correlations, trends, outliers and more insights. It can also use that data to spin up advanced visualizations, like heatmaps, that can be inserted as static images over cells in spreadsheets.
"Just click the Gemini spark icon on the top right-hand side of your spreadsheet and try asking things like 'predict my net income for the next quarter based on historical data' or 'create a simple heatmap of support cases by category and device,'" Google said in a blog post.
How to use the new Gemini feature in Google Sheets
To get started, just click the Gemini icon in the top right-hand side of your spreadsheet. That'll open up a chat with Gemini, where you can ask Google's AI model to give you insight on your data, like identifying anomalies in inventory levels for specific products or identifying the top three performing channels.
To do all of this, Google has said Gemini creates and runs Python code, then performs a multi-layered analysis based on what the code turns up. For simpler requests, it can also use normal spreadsheet formulas to generate the required information.
Google notes that to get the most accurate results possible, you should use a consistent format with clear headers and no missing values.
Before this upgrade, Gemini's functionality in Sheets was limited to creating tables or walking you through how to perform certain tasks.
The Sheets upgrade joins several other Gemini features that Google's added in recent months. Just last week, Google rolled out the ability to analyze and summarize documents, previously a Gemini Advanced exclusive, to free users.
In February, Google announced significant updates to its Gemini 2.0 AI model lineup, including a more affordable option and an advanced version with enhanced image generation and text-to-speech capabilities.
It's part of Google's ongoing efforts to advance AI technology and keep pace with competitors offering similar AI models for free like OpenAI and DeepSeek.
