Google sheets is free, it doesn’t cost anything to be able to use a vast quantity of professional level features and share and collaborate with other users. But there are some pre-requisites.
The main and most important one, is that you need a Google account in order to use it, and the people you want to collaborate with, also need Google accounts. The good thing about Google accounts is, that they are also free!
Google Sheets is part of the Google eco-system, the Google ethos, the Google way, the Google product suite… And that product suite is pretty large. There’s a paid for version of Google products for power users and businesses that need more advanced features and this is officially (currently) known as ‘Google Workspace’ (It used to be called G-Suite).
Free accounts give you pretty much ALL the features of Google Sheets, there’s very little you can’t do with a free account. The paid versions of these apps inside Google workspace tend to be geared towards power users who need to manage multiple users, use a lot of processing power, or a lot of cloud drive space. I’ve run several businesses and the free version of Google products has always been enough.
When you signup to a Google Account you will (using a single login), have access to a wide variety of free Google tools. Here’s a look at some of them…
| Google Product | Description |
| Drive | 15 GB of cloud storage space to store documents, photos and video |
| Sheets | The thing you are here to learn about, Excel in your browser |
| Slides | Slides allows you to easily create slide based presentations |
| Free web-based email, one of the best and most reliable email accounts | |
| Calendar | A calendar for all your reminders and appointments |
| Keep | A note taking and sharing system |
| Photos | A place to store, view and edit your photo and video collection (uses your ‘Drive’ space (unless you set your photos to save in ‘storage save’ mode) |
| YouTube | Your own YouTube channel, comments and history will use your Google account |
| Analytics | Tools to track visitors to your websites and apps |
| and more …. | For the full list… https://about.google/products/#all-products |
It’s worth checking you don’t already have a google account. If you use gmail, youtube or any other Google service listed above, you might, but if you don’t already have one, all you need to do to get one is visit https://accounts.google.com.
Enter some basic information about yourself, and you will be given a choice of email address. Pick one you like, or create your own. But don’t worry about having yet another email address, it’s simple enough to re-route all of the emails that will come to your gmail address to wherever your current inbox lives (outlook.com or some other provider).
Accept the terms and conditions and the various agreements and once you’ve signed up, if you aren’t automatically redirected go to: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets
This is the main google sheets explorer.
Hardware Requirements
Desktop Computers
Google sheets works on any device you can browse the internet on. Your phone, your Windows aptop, desktop, your MacBook, Chromebook, Linux machine. It does so because it is designed primarily to run inside the Google Chrome browser.
On a desktop computer, to get the best out of Google sheets you should use Chrome and you should have JavaScript and Cookies turned on (don’t worry about that if you don’t know what they are, they will be turned on by default on a new installation of Chrome).
You can use other browsers like Edge, Safari or Firefox, but you may not be guaranteed compatability and the odd feature may not work exactly as advertised. But the chances of that are pretty small.
Mobile Devices
You can also open, view, update and access many of the features of your spreadsheets using your mobile device. Whilst you can open your sheets on a mobile phone using your browser, there is also a dedicated Google sheets app available on the Apple AppStore and the Google Play store.
These apps make working with your sheets quicker, and more user friendly. As viewing anything other than a simple spreadsheet on a browser on your phone can get fiddly.