Making Tables in Google Sheets is Easy

A quick primer on organizing data into tables

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.

screenshot of movie dataset

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

screenshot of selecting alternating colors

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.

screenshot of setting up a table

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.

screenshot of setting up a filter

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.

screenshot of adding data to table

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

screenshot of filtering data

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!

gif of boy saying he understands completely

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 process using a larger movie dataset:

Have a great one!

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