If you believe Google Sheets isn’t enough, you can look into the add-ons and streamline procedures, which will make things simpler for you. While many Google Sheets add-ons are free, others need a payment.
Google has thousands of add-ons and extensions in its Workspace Marketplace that may do anything from translate your spreadsheets to generating reports. We have selected our top 10 Google Sheets add-ons to spare you the time and effort of sorting through all the available options to locate what you need.
How to Use Google Sheets Add-Ons
Since you only need to install them, using Google Sheets add-ons is rather easy to do. The usage instructions for each add-on may vary because they are frequently distinct from one another. But after you’ve set up the desired add-on, you can just read the documentation and adhere to the guidelines. To make the most of the add-ons you install, it’s a good idea to become familiar with their features.
Several add-ons can be installed and used at once, however depending on your computer, there can come a time when doing so is ineffective. If you have too many add-ons, your screen may become cluttered or difficult to manage.
How to Install Google Sheets Add-Ons
First, simply open a new or existing Google Sheet to begin installing add-ons. From the upper toolbar, click ‘Extensions’ and select ‘add-ons’ from the drop-down menu.
By doing so, the Google Workspace Marketplace will open, allowing you to browse their inventory or conduct a search for a certain add-on.
Click on the blue “Install” button when you find an add-on you’d want to add to your Google Sheets workspace. Simply select “Manage my add-ons” from the same “Add-ons” toolbar option if you want to remove any add-ons. Really, that’s all there is to it.
Our Picks for Top Google Sheets Add-Ons
Now that you understand the basics of adding and removing add-ons, we’ll show you some of the top Google Sheets add-ons that can level-up your spreadsheet experience.
Template Gallery for Sheets
Creator: Vertex42.com
Price: Free
Link: Install Template Gallery for Sheets
Who is this for? This app is great for educators and students; for small businesses and freelancers; and for personal productivity and finance.
This add-on provides you with a new selection of pre-built Google Sheets templates you wouldn’t find in Google’s stock template library (Public Gallery). The templates have their own user-friendly usage guides and are completely free to use.
We are impressed by the amount of free templates in this add-on and we’re sure you could save time by just using one of these templates instead of making your own from scratch.
Click to view and install Template Gallery for Sheets via Google Workspace Marketplace.
Wolfram|Alpha for Google Sheets
Creator: Wolfram Research
Price: Free
Link: Install Wolfram|Alpha for Google Sheets
Who is this for? We believe anyone can benefit from Wolfram|Alpha’s computational power. This app is exceptionally great for students, educators, and academics. Writers and researchers will also appreciate the boost it provides in answering questions very quickly without having to leave Google Sheets.
Wolfram|Alpha adds a new sidebar that answers your questions based on natural language. It can also perform calculations based on the content of your selected cells.
Here are just a few examples of what it can solve or answer for you:
- Unit conversions
- Mathematical questions
- Currency conversion based on live data
- Finding zip codes of addresses
- Looking up general facts like: country capitals, flags, currency; historical dates, people, places; distances between cities, countries, planets, stars, galaxies — most scientific queries you throw at it..
- Scientific names of animals, plants, etc.
- Looking up statistical data like: populations, climate, average lifespans, etc.
FileDrop
Creator: HeadwayApps
Price: Free plan available. Paid subscription starts at $5 per month .
Link: Install FileDrop for Google Sheets
Who is this for? Power users, businesses, and individuals looking to be more productive within Google Sheets. Great tool for team collaboration as well.
Welcome to our very own FileDrop.
FileDrop is a powerful sidebar app for Google Sheets that allows you to insert any file type into Google Sheet cells using drag and drop. The files you add are uploaded to your Google Drive and linked to the file for your convenience.
It also easily allows you to add files already in your Google Drive using the Drive Browser which acts like a file manager app. A search function is available if you need to find a particular file in Google Drive quickly without leaving Google Sheets. This experience is made better by a File Library that keeps your recent history so you can easily track your files and reuse them across multiple documents.
There are also other very useful features like PDF to text or image to text using optical character recognition and inserting images to cells or over cells.
Power Tools
Creator: Ablebits
Price: Free 30-day trial
Link: Install Template Gallery for Sheets
One of the most popular add-ons for Sheets, Power Tools provides you with 30 solutions to common tasks that may otherwise take a lot of your precious time. Notable functions include:
- Merge and combine sheets, cells in rows, columns, or specified ranges.
- Manipulate capitalizations – change to upper or lower case
- Remove unwanted characters, strings, line breaks, commas, leading and trailing spaces, etc.
- Randomize values, dates, numbers, strings, etc
- Compare data, find and remove duplicates
- Split assist tools
Yet Another Mail Merge (YAMM)
Creator: Talarian
Price: Free individual account with up to 50 recipients per day. Paid accounts start at $25 per year per user.
Link: Install YAMM for Sheets
Yet Another Mail Merge is a powerful add-on for Google Sheets and Gmail that allows you to send bulk personalized emails from a Gmail account to a list of contacts within Google Sheets. It is also able to track if your emails are opened, replied to, or if a contact unsubscribed.
This saves you a lot of time if you do email campaigns and store your contacts in a Google Sheets spreadsheet. The emails sent through YAMM reach a contact’s primary inbox, not the Junk or Spam folder.
There are truly countless ways you can be more productive in Google Sheets. Using time-saving add-ons are an obvious choice if you’re looking to maximize your time and work smarter instead of harder.