How to Automate Google Sheets With Macros - No Coding Required

Spreadsheets are powerful tools and they're also frustrating nightmares of confusing formulas, hidden features, and messy data. Excel has long included a macro tool to automate those tedious tasks away—and now, with Google Sheets' new macro tool, you can build your own automation in Google's online spreadsheet app, too.

By recording your steps into a macro, you can teach Google Sheets how to do them at the click of a button, and never have to manually do it again. And as a bonus, if you want to add a custom keyboard shortcut for any one menu item in Google Sheets, you can now do that in Google Sheets with a quick macro.

Here's how to use macros in Google Sheets.

How to Make a Macro in Google Sheets

Macros are spreadsheet functions that can automatically do anything in your spreadsheet, faster. They can remove or add formatting, insert extra rows and columns, fill in tricky functions, clean up data, and more.

You just have to teach your spreadsheet what you want it to do, then press the button or keyboard shortcut to run the macro.

Macros are handy to speed up your own work, and even more useful when you need to hand off work to someone else. Instead of needing to tell them exactly how to set up the spreadsheet and which functions to add, tell them to run your macro and the spreadsheet can do it for you.

All you need to do is first build the macro. In Google Sheets, open your spreadsheet, and then click Tools → Macros → Record Macro.

That will open a small Recording New Macro box in the bottom of your spreadsheet. Whatever you click or type in Google Sheets now will be recorded—and done again in that same order when you run that macro.

With Google Sheets Macros you can:

• Use any Google Sheets formatting tools
• Use any feature in a Google Sheets toolbar, menu, or right-click menu
• Use any Google Sheets function
• Select any cell, row, or column
• Use Google Sheets standard keyboard shortcuts
• Type any text into a spreadsheet

Anything you routinely do in Google Sheets, you can have a Macro do in a fraction of the time, on its own.