How to quickly group data in Sheets

Do you ever find yourself staring at a spreadsheet full of information, wishing there was an easier way to organize it? Well, fret no more! Google Sheets has a powerful tool called the Group By View that can help you quickly categorize and analyze your data in seconds.

This post will walk you through the step-by-step process of using Group By View, along with some handy tips on formatting your data.

How to quickly group data

Let’s start with the raw data. Select the “Status” cell.

Then go to the filter view menu, select “Create group by view”, then click “Status”.

This creates a table and automatically groups the data by the different statuses. It’s very clear which orders are in the different stages.

How to save a grouped view

This view is temporary, which means if we reload the sheet, we won’t see this view, but we can save the view to quickly use it in the future. Click “Save view”.

Then give it a name and click “Save”.

We can see that the view has changed from a temporary one to the one called “Group by Status”. This also makes the view available for others to use.

If we remove the view, we are left with the table we made.

Group views available with tables

As we have created a table, if we go to the filter view menu again, we can see that we can group our table of data by the four headers we have in the table.

As you can see below, we can quickly group the data in different ways, for example, here by the product.

Formatting the data in the columns

As we’re using a table, we can easily make the data look better by adding drop-down menus and to also control the format of the data in them. Click on the downwards arrow in the header. Then click “Edit column type” and then “Drop-down”.

This adds drop-down menus in the column, making it easy to add and change data.

In the sidebar, we can add some colour to the drop-downs by clicking on the circles next to each one.

How to change the name of a table

We can also change the name of the table by double-clicking the title in the top left-hand corner of the table.

Final table of data

Now we have a better looking table of data and with the grouping makes it very easy to understand what’s going on.

It’s a great, simple way to work with your data, and works well with the new tables in Sheets.

Group by view is one of a number of new features in Google Sheets. If you want to learn more, check out my post and short video on Conditional Notifications.