Google Sheets is an ideal choice, whether you want to manage tasks, create a report, or save data.
It lets you collaborate with your teams easily and has advanced features that make Sheets the go-to-tool for businesses. Google Sheets is not just about rows and columns. Apart from advanced formulas to sort your data, Google Sheets also come with ready-made templates that can save your time. Before we dig into "how" to use Google Sheets templates, let's take a look at a few Google Sheets templates available.
Types of Google Sheets Templates
There are few ways to deal with templates on Google Sheets. You can either use their default templates or find templates online.
The idea is to find a template you can easily customize, save in your folder (or submit if you have a Google Suite account), and reuse for later.
1. Google Sheets Default Templates
If you don’t work with Google Suite, you’ll find yourself using Google’s default templates or making a template folder. The default templates aren’t many, but they’re surprisingly helpful for the most common types of sheet documents you might need. Here are a few templates to start with -
- Expense report template: This template makes it easy to include and calculate the expenses of a project, travel, or activity. It is very useful if you need to approve a budget for, let’s say, a meeting outside the city (though you’re unlikely to use a default template in these specific circumstances).
- Gantt Chart: The great thing about creating a Gantt chart with Google sheets is that everyone on your team can collaborate on it easily. The default Gantt chart template makes it easy to track key tasks, delegate them, and plan your projects nicely. Customizing it isn’t complicated, given that it already has everything you need unless you want to implement something more sophisticated.
- CRM template: If you need a lightweight CRM for yourself, the CRM template is absolutely complete and even has a quick guide to use it. It comes with tabs for contacts, accounts, opportunities, and a dashboard that lets you keep track of everything.
- Budget calculation template: Spreadsheets are excellent for calculating essential metrics like ROIs, net present values, and budgets. The default budget calculator template allows you to do this with ease by adding your values and without doing any math yourself.
2. Finding Templates Online
Unfortunately, Google Sheets doesn’t have templates for everything. And often, you’ll need to find templates elsewhere unless you prefer working on a blank sheet from scratch.
There are websites like Template.net where you can find more than a thousand templates that fit your needs in an instant. Using a template from here is simple: Click on your preferred template and download it as a Google Sheet document. You can then upload it to your Google folder quickly or submit it to your Google Suite template gallery.
Now that you know what kind of templates you can create, let's get straight to the steps to using a Google Sheet template.
How to Use Google Sheets Templates
Using a Google Sheet template is pretty straightforward. It’s all within the app, and you rarely need to rely on other apps. Here are the steps:
1) Go to Google Sheets. And on the home page, click on “template gallery.” Here is where you’ll find all the default templates.
Pro Tip: if you can’t see the templates on the home page, go to Google Sheets settings and turn the templates option on.
2) Choose your template. You’ll see all the Google Sheets default templates related to work, such as calendar sheets, business budgets, invoices, purchase orders, and even a CRM.
Note: If you’re on your company's Google Suite, you’ll see a tab with your business name where you can find all your company’s templates without needing to use the default ones.
3) Customize the template. If you’re using a default template, you might want to customize it with your business logo, information and removing sections you don’t need.
Pro Tip: You can create your own template from a blank sheet. It might take more time, but it would be 100% made for you. Once the document is set up, you can start using it right away, share it, or save it in its corresponding drive folder. For instance, take a look at how Google Sheets can be used as a to-do list.
4) Save and use for later. You don’t want to customize the same document twice. To do this, click on the move icon and select your template folder (or create one). It will move the document to the folder and let you access all your templates in a few clicks. So later — when you need to use it, you can easily copy this template and do your tasks quicker.
Note: If you’re on Google Suite, you can also submit your templates by going to your company’s template gallery and hitting “submit template”.
You know about the types of Google Sheets templates available and how to use them. However, when it comes to populating your Google Sheets with data, you can automate it by syncing your Google Sheets templates with other work apps. This means no more manual updating of Google Sheets. Here are a few use cases you can start exploring on Automate.io:
And that's a wrap on how to use and leverage Google Sheets templates. Try using the Sheets templates and customize them as per your requirements.
