Working with Cells in Google Sheets

Now that we know where everything is, it’s time to start adding something to the canvas, AKA, the cells.

Start with a blank sheet. You’ll notice that cell A1 is highlighted with a blue border, like a cursor. It lets you know where you are. Also, in the top left corner, you can see ‘A1’, so if you can’t see your highlighted cell, you can always check that to find out where you are.

You can start typing something when a cell like this is highlighted. Each cell has two levels; level one, like the image above, and a second, as you can see below. The second level does not have the little blue square in the bottom right corner, but it does have a flashing cursor within the cell.

Why two levels then, I hear you say? Well, clicking on a cell highlights it, and double-clicking it enters you into that cell. You need to enter into the cell to add formulas and line breaks.

If you type something on a highlighted cell, it will automatically drop down into level 2. Of course, if there were text, numbers or formulas in the cell, it would be replaced with whatever you just typed on the highlighted cell, so watch out for this. But if things go pear-shaped, don’t panic; you can just undo the last action by clicking on the undo back arrow or the redo forward arrow. There’s a shortcut key for these too, which is handy. Cmd+Z on a Mac or Ctrl+Z on a PC will undo, and Cmd+Y on a Mac or Ctrl+Y on a PC will redo.

You can click these arrows or use the shortcut keys multiple times to go backwards or forward as often as you need.

If you were to paste some text onto a highlighted cell, its formatting colours and size would remain the same as where you got the text from, but if you did the same in level 2, then the default formatting would apply. So, for example, in the image below, the pasted version looks different from the formula bar text. This is because the text in the formula bar is the default (Arial); it’s what’s in the cell, but the highlighted cell displays formatted text.

When you start using sheets, if you’re new to them, you don’t even think about this; it just comes naturally to you.

Once you’ve added some text or numbers to a cell, you can hit enter or the tab key. Enter will move the cursor (highlighted cell) to the next row down, whereas the tab key moves the cursor to the next column along to the right.

If you want to delete something, you can just click once to highlight the cell and hit the backspace or delete key to delete it, or if you enter into the cell, the backspace will delete one character at a time, whereas the delete key will do nothing.

Moving on, we will create a basic table for the next topic.