If you’ve written a document in Google Docs and you want to have a live spreadsheet linked
to it, you can do that now.
There is only a couple of easy steps.
We’ll go through them pretty quickly.
The important thing is that the table you end up with in Google Docs is a link to Google
Sheets.
So, any updates that you make in Sheets will update in the Google Doc.
That is, of course, unless you print it or as a PDF.
While it’s in Docs, it’s updated.
First you want to start in Google Sheets.
Obviously, if you have a table that you want to embed, it’s already made in Sheets, not
in Google Docs.
And here it is, it has some fake data in it.
You want to select the area of the Sheet that you want to link and right-click copy it.
Go back to your Google Doc.
I am going to do that again even though I’ve already done it because I want to show you
happens.
Click paste.
Because Google Docs knows that you have a linked Sheet on your clipboard, it give you
this pop-up.
If you paste it unlinked, it puts it in there one time, breaks the link, and it will never
update.
This tutorial is about how you do it linked because your Sheet may change and you want
to link to the most recent version.
We’re going to leave it on “Link to spreadsheet”, choose paste, and then there’s the live
Sheet.
It’s the same as the one above so we’re going to delete it for now and use the one
above.
I’ll show you some nuances about how to work with it.
But, the basic thing that you’re trying to accomplish has already been done.
That’s linked, live, and has the same formatting.
One of the features of this being live is that it’s going to update when you update
your Google Sheet.
We’re going to go back into here and change one of these names.
This is actually this person’s son, so it should be Jr.
Then, I forget to update the Doc, right?
Then I come back in there months later and this button has appeared.
It knows that I updated the Google Sheet.
Let’s just click this button.
You’ll see the name update and that was easy.
If you want to add something to this data, it doesn’t really work the way you expect
it to.
At least, it didn’t work the way I expected it to.
I added a row and this is just “another row”.
Then I go back, see that just added, it know it’supdated.
It knows it is updated, but when you click “Update table” it added the row, but it
pushed the last one down.
Google Docs is not going to assume that you wanted to make the table larger.
It’s just going to assume that you wanted to change what was in it.
You have to select the table and then do the “More options” and “Change range”.
It doesn’t bring you back to your Google Sheet, but it does bring up the range that
you had selected.
You know that since you just added a row that all you need to do is increment this last
number by one, right?
We’re going to do D8 and click OK.
And there, you have the table with the added row.
It’s going to work in a similar fashion if you add a column.
The other thing that you might want to do with this is, it may be formatted the way
you want when it’s in the Google Sheet but in the Google Doc it might not look right.
When you have it selected, you can just right-click and go
to “Table Properties…” or just change the
Sheet to be the way that you want and update it.
That way, in both places, you’re looking at the same thing.
But, if you want, you can edit it directly in Google Docs.
If you want to see a live example of this, you can just go to the webpage and just scroll
down to the bottom.
The Google Doc and the Google Sheet are both shared with public links so you should be
able to click on these and you’ll be able to see it.
This video obviously hasn’t been updated with the one I’m making right now so ignore
that.
This step-by-step tutorial will run you through this.
It shouldn’t be all that hard and it’s really useful.