It’s now even easier to create Google Sheets tables

Google recently introduced a new table formatting feature in Sheets that made it far easier to create self-contained, sortable blocks of cells inside a spreadsheet. But the company didn’t stop there and seems to be rapidly updating the software with features that make it faster to set up, configure, and view data within a table.

The latest update, which is rolling out in stages now, builds on its earlier addition of table formatting by adding “intelligent suggestions” that show a “+” button when you select data that could be turned into a table. Clicking the button then formats the data with things like alternating colors and sortable, filterable headers. The change expands on Google’s table formatting feature from May, which made it easy to quickly add tables to a spreadsheet — making people like me very happy.

Earlier this month, Google made an update that let you quickly add rows by hovering your mouse on the left edge of a table and clicking a “+” button there and add columns by hovering on the right. At the same time, the company introduced automatic column categories; so when you convert data to a table, Sheets determines what format the data in each column should take — currency columns may be formatted so numbers always have a dollar sign, or date columns might always have two-digit years at the end, for instance.

It’s great to see Google making so many improvements to Sheets. Before all of this, you’d have to manually format data to turn it into a table, a slow-going process. But now, selecting a block of data and converting it does things for you, like setting alternating colors and converting column headers so that you can sort and filter by the data beneath them. I like spreadsheets as much as the next guy, but even I found all of this stuff tedious before.