You can't crunch numbers or easily sort columns of data inside a Google Docs document. Those tasks are better left to spreadsheets. But once you have your data organized and formatted in your spreadsheet, you can easily add it to your Google Doc.
Here, I'll show you how to embed a Google Sheet into a Google Doc. Plus, learn how to update a table in Google Docs with just one click.
Table of contents:
Here's how to embed a Google Sheet into a Google Doc, so you can show snippets of your spreadsheet data.
A couple of things to keep in mind:
If you haven't already tried syncing Google Sheets and Google Docs in this way, give it a go. At a minimum, you'll have a beautifully formatted table in your Google Doc. And I, for one, am always looking to make my Google Docs just a little bit prettier.
It would be time-consuming (and ripe for errors) if you had to manually update the table in your doc every time you updated your original data source. Fortunately, Google thought ahead on this one.
Before I get into how to update your table in Google Docs—with just one click—a quick note: when you originally copied data from your spreadsheet to your document, you effectively copied a specific cell range. In the original example, only data from cells A2:D7 were copied.
If you know you'll be adding more rows or columns of data to your Google Sheet, it's important to update the data range for your table in Google Docs.
Expanded view of the linked table options dropdown in Google Docs with the option to change range highlighted." />
If you're not sure about what data you might add down the road, I suggest giving yourself an additional five to 10 rows as a buffer. For example, if my original data range was A1:D7, I would update this to A1:D12. If you need to add additional columns, your table will get compressed, so keep this in mind when formatting your document.
Now back to actually updating your table in Google Docs.
For the purposes of this section, I've added more rows of box office data to my spreadsheet. Now I want to update the table in my Google Doc so it matches what I've recorded in Google Sheets.
Your table will update and the Update button will disappear, indicating that your table reflects the most recent version of your spreadsheet data (or the data range indicated for your table).
Every time you make updates to your spreadsheet, be sure to go back into your document and select Update.
If you need to add visual data to your Google Doc, here's how to insert a chart from Google Sheets.
This will embed an image of the chart into your Google Doc, which you can resize or move around as needed. If you need to tweak the chart, edit the original chart in Google Sheets. Then in Google Docs, select your chart, and click Update just as you would with your table.
If you're tired of manually copying and pasting data from Google Sheets to Google Docs (or vice versa), automate the process instead. With Zapier, you can connect Google Sheets to Google Docs to automatically send info between the two apps. Get started with one of our pre-made templates.
