@andrei !
@randy just shared about this the other day in one of our Slack channels. It’s a feature that Excel has had for a while, which allowed us to improve the performance of our template formulas for the Foundation Template.
This is an excerpt from @benlcollins’ weekly newsletter, which I highly recommend for more great and informative content about Google Sheets.
Why should you use Tables?
There are many benefits to using Tables, including:
- Quick and easy to apply formatting
- Header row is automatically locked at the top of the Table
- Nice selection of pre-built Table templates
- Nice selection of pre-built styles
- Super easy to add dropdowns or smart chips to columns
- Formulas automatically applied down whole column
- Formatting and calculations are applied automatically to new rows
- Super easy access to filter and group by views
- Some folks will love the Structured Table formula referencing
- Built-in data validation with the column datatypes
When should you not use Tables?
Like any spreadsheet technique, Tables won’t be the best choice for every situation:
- Tables might be confusing to people who are unfamiliar with them
- They introduce additional complexity and clutter to Sheets that you might not want
- The structured Table reference formulas can be confusing to the uninitiated
- They work best with uniform underlying data. If your data has blank rows, subtotals, etc. then Tables may not interpret it correctly
- It’s sometimes not possible to convert large, complex datasets into Tables