Google Sheets is arguably one of the best spreadsheet apps you can find today, with Google leaving no stone unturned in maintaining that standing in the industry. Earlier this month, the Workspace blog announced a “highly-requested” feature for sheets — smooth scrolling on the web. This feature is now making its wider appearance across multiple continents, although it’s not yet available on all accounts.
Simply put, smooth scrolling lets users effortlessly scroll through a spreadsheet rather than jumping through individual cells. This is quite a minor difference and one that could go easily unnoticed. Our Google Editor Manuel Vonau was the first to spot its arrival, while a couple of others on the Android Police team also have smooth scrolling in Sheets.
Google said last week that smooth scrolling will work throughout Sheets’ various functionalities, such as when using the on-screen scrollbars instead of a mouse or trackpad. It should also work with other Sheets features like hidden columns, frozen rows, comments, charts, or even when you have a right-to-left layout set for the spreadsheet.
Smooth scrolling on Sheets (left); Sheets without smooth scrolling (right)
Despite being a relatively minor change, this will no doubt make Sheets a whole lot better to use. Comparing the old version of cell-to-cell scrolling and smooth scrolling side-by-side illustrates the difference quite clearly.
Based on Google’s verbiage, smooth scrolling will be on by default for every Sheets user, with no toggle available. However, providing a settings toggle seems logical, especially for environments and workplaces that still use cell-to-cell scrolling. But as it stands, smooth scrolling will be enabled on Sheets whether you like it or not.
I found that smooth scrolling is enabled on my Workspace account but not my personal Google account. The aforementioned Workspace blog post from last week stated that it could take up to (or over) 15 days for the feature to be widely visible across personal and Workspace accounts, so the inconsistency in the feature’s appearance does make sense. Head over to Sheets now to check if smooth scrolling is live for you.
Maybe if we start telling people the brain is an app they will start using it!
