Making Tables in Google Sheets is Easy

Tables make things easier, more readable, more manageable. In short, they’re a way to quickly organize your data in a spreadsheet.

In Google Sheets, unlike Excel, there is not a command to “make a table”. Instead, we can use a bit of formatting to do the same thing.

Let’s say we’ve got a table of movies like in the screenshot below.

By selecting all the data and then clicking Format → Alternating Colors from the toolbar, we can create a more visually appealing table format.

There are several options to select from → you can elect to have a header row or not and then change the styling of the alternating row colors.

Then by selecting the header row, we can choose the filter option from the toolbar to enable us to sort the data in the table however we wish.

Suppose we need to add some data. When we type the next line, it will automatically apply the table alternating color format to subsequent lines.

Now, any time we need to reorganize the data, we can click the filter selectors in the headers and sort it however we need.

This won’t make you feel better about the state of popular cinema, but it will let you see your data more clearly and use it more effectively!

Hope this is helpful for you! If you know someone who’d benefit from this newsletter, please forward them a copy.

Here's a video walkthrough of the whole process with a bigger movie dataset:

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Have a great one!