When your boss asks for that TPS report and wants it full of fancy graphs and other bells and whistles, you know it’s your solemn duty to deliver it with a smile, ASAP. If Google Docs is your platform of choice for office document editing, you would have been frustrated by the inability to plot lines to show in a simple and visible way, the trends in your report data. That changes now though, as Google has added trend lines to various charts in Google Sheets as well as the ability to paste in charts from other sheets.
A mass of seemingly random data points in a chart is not always attractive to everyone, so being able to use that data to plot out visual trend lines in charts can be invaluable to you or whomever asked for the data. The new trend lines will be available in the scatter plot, line, column, and bar charts and gives two options for types of trend lines. If your data changes in a very regular way, you can use a linear trend line to plot a straight line or if your data is more of a curve, following varying changes in data, you can use an exponential line to plot out curves. Also available are options for how the lines will be styled. You can change the color, thickness, label type, transparency, and how tight to the data the line will stick. All these things give you an extra level of control over how your lines are displayed so you can easily fit them into existing spreadsheets without a jarring appearance.
If you’ve received a Google Sheet that already has a chart in it with different data, you can also copy that chart and paste it into another sheet now. The data behind the chart is copied, not linked to the source sheet, so if you do this, you’ll need to be aware that changes to the original do not reflect in the new sheet. You can also copy the chart to a document or presentation and it will be pasted as an image, frozen in the state it was in when you copied it. That can be great for creating presentations that more easily appeal to people who aren’t really interested in the nuts and bolts of the data and just want to see how it changes over time. That will be great for those TPS reports.
