Spreadsheets are useful for a lot of things, and among those uses, there’s project/task managing. Google Sheets is one of the most easily accessible and useful spreadsheet services, and now, it’s getting a little friendlier for task management purposes as well.

Google has announced that Sheets is gaining support for dropdown chips. You can add dropdown chips to cells within your spreadsheet and assign different colors, serving as an additional visual indicator and letting you know the status of something at a glance. In a way, they look very similar to the dropdown chips that are used often in proper task-managing services like Asana and Airtable.

The workflow for creating these chips, and all other data validation rules, has also been changed. Now, any rules that have been established in a certain Sheets tab may be seen, edited, and new rules can be added from a sidebar view. According to Google, this workflow is now similar to how you establish rules for named ranges, protected ranges, and conditional formatting.

It’s important to point out that Sheets already had support for dropdown items in menus. If anything, this seems to be building on top of that by making those dropdowns easier to create, as well as adding the colored “chip” visual element — as of right now, they were pretty much just text items.

This feature is rolling out now, and it should be available on everyone’s Sheets within the next 15 days.

Source: Google