Improving your spreadsheets, both at work and on the road, will become a lot faster thanks to a major update to Google Sheets.
Google’s spreadsheet software has unveiled a series of improvements that will make the platform “work significantly faster” when making calculations in popular browsers.
Google Chrome and Microsoft Edge users will benefit from the improvements, which also promise improvements when running formulas, creating pivot tables, using conditional formatting and more – regardless of the size of the file used.
Speed of Google Sheets
“We’re making it easier and faster to format, calculate, and manage your data in Google Sheets, whether you’re just starting out or are already a Sheets expert,” says a Google Workspace blog post outlining the updates mentioned.
“The latest advances in Sheets will help you be more productive, from everyday tasks to complex projects.”
The improvements are due to the fact that Google Sheets now uses WebAssembly Garbage Collection (WasmGC), rather than JavaScript, for code execution purposes. Google describes WasmGC as an extension to the existing WebAssembly specification that can help speed up the operation of Google Spreadsheets by reclaiming memory allocated by the program, but it is no longer referenced.
The speed improvements are now rolling out to all Google Workspace and personal users of Chrome and Edge – and the company says it’s preparing to add support for non-Chromium browsers (namely Safari and Firefox) soon.
The company is also working on “exploring new ways to improve the Sheets experience,” namely “reducing initial load time and improving copy, paste, and filter performance.”
The announcement is the latest upgrade to Google Sheets, which should help users be more productive and efficient with the software.
Recently, the company announced that it would be adding the Google Gemini AI helper platform to Sheets. A new side panel accessible to users can analyze and extract insights from all your files and documents, provide suggestions on how to quickly get started with a new spreadsheet, and summarize any findings from your current work.