How to add data to your spreadsheet

Look around the white and gray grid that occupies most of your screen, and the first thing you'll notice is a blue outline around the selected cell or cells.

When you open a new spreadsheet, if you just start typing, you'll see that your data starts populating the top-left cell immediately. There's no need to double-click cells when you add information, and not much need to use your mouse.

An individual square in a spreadsheet is called a cell; they're organized into rows and columns with number and letter IDs, respectively. Each cell should contain one value, word, or piece of data.

Feel free to select any cell you'd like, then go ahead and type something in. When you finish entering data into a cell, you can do one of four things:

1. Press Enter / return to save the data and move to the beginning of the next row.
2. Press Tab to save the data and move to the right in the same row.
3. Use the arrow keys on your keyboard (up, down, left, and right) to move one cell in that direction.
4. Click any cell to jump directly to that cell.

If you don't want to type in everything manually, you can also add data to your Sheet en masse via a few different methods:

1. Copy and paste a list of text or numbers into your spreadsheet.
2. Copy and paste an HTML table from a website.
3. Import an existing spreadsheet in CSV, XLS, XLSX, and other formats.
4. Copy any value in a cell across a range of cells via a click and drag.
   
   

Copy and paste is pretty self-explanatory, but there are times when you'll try to copy a "spreadsheet-y" set of data from a website or PDF, and it will just paste into one cell or format everything with the original styling. To avoid pulling your hair out, try looking for data that's actually in an HTML table (like movie data from IMDb, for example) to avoid getting funky pasted data in your spreadsheet.