Official Google Docs Blog: Custom views give you more control of your spreadsheets

Official Google Docs Blog: Custom views give you more control of your spreadsheets

Wednesday, March 18, 2009 3:52 PM

A few weeks ago we enhanced mobile access to spreadsheets by adding the ability to add, edit, sort, and filter rows. Today, I'm happy to announce that this same list view is now available when you're working on spreadsheets from desktop and notebook computers. You can find list view under the View menu.
List view provides a simplified interface to your spreadsheet. Here's an example of a spreadsheet that could be used by employees that are staffing a trade show booth:


Notice that you can quickly sort and filter data in list view without changing the underlying spreadsheet. Each sort and filter view has a unique web address (URL), making it easy to return to a particular view to inspect and analyze your data. You can share list view URLs with your colleagues, provided they have permission to access the spreadsheet. Below, I've filtered the spreadsheet to see who requested "Large" t-shirts on "Tuesday":

List view can also be embedded in a web page, either in read-only or editable mode. Here I've embedded a view of the example spreadsheet right into this blog post:



Here are a few more ways to use list view:

• Imagine that you collected 100 names and t-shirt sizes using a Google Docs form. You might share a list view of the form responses, allowing people to fix errors (such as someone entering the wrong size) without worrying about a novice user accidentally messing up other parts of the spreadsheet.
• Rather than embedding a published snapshot of a spreadsheet in your Google Sites page, you can now embed a read-only list view of the spreadsheet, which allows users to easily sort, filter and page through the data.

List view also loads very quickly in your browser, making it especially useful when you just want to quickly give others basic editing access rather than the full functionality normally available. And if you're using list view and need full spreadsheet functionality, just follow the "Go to spreadsheet view" link.