Lock down cells with Protected Ranges in Google spreadsheets

Editing with others in real-time makes it easy to get stuff done in Google spreadsheets in only a matter of minutes. But with so many people working in the same space, it’s possible to modify a section that a collaborator didn’t intend to be touched. That’s why, today, we’re updating the Named Ranges feature in spreadsheets to let you also protect them.

To get started with Protected Ranges in a shared spreadsheet, highlight the cells you’d like to protect, right-click, and choose Name and protect range from the menu.

Click through the presentation below to see the feature in action.



Even more spreadsheet features added this month 

Along with the arrival of protected ranges, you can now add colors and patterns when you apply cell borders in Google spreadsheets. We also updated find and replace to make it possible to search using patterns (also called regular expressions). For example, “^[A-Z]+” will find all the cells that start with uppercase letters.

As always, Google spreadsheets is getting better every day, so stay tuned for even more features and updates in the coming weeks.

Posted by: Joe Kaptur, Software Engineer

450+ new ways to make your Google presentations pop

Good design is an important part of getting your point across in a presentation. Over time we’ve added a bunch of features to help you bring a little something extra to your decks, like slide transitions and animations, thousands of free stock photos, and a growing collection of templates.

Today, creating eye-catching presentations gets even easier, with more than 450 new fonts to choose from. (flip through the presentation below to see them in action)


To browse and select new fonts, click on Add fonts from the bottom of the fonts dropdown in the toolbar. This will take you to the menu of all available fonts, where you can pick the ones you want to use.

Any fonts that you select will get automatically added to your fonts list so it’s easy to find them later.

Plus, fonts that you’ve already added to Google documents will automatically appear in your presentations font list too.

So next time you're working on a presentation, jazz it up with some Calligrafitti, Indie Flower, Short Stack, or hundreds of other new choices.

Posted by Erin Rosenbaum, Software Engineer