Google wants to add a splash of color to your boring old spreadsheets

Microsoft Excel
(Image credit: Shutterstock / 200dgr)

Google has announced an upgrade for Sheets and Slides that makes adding a splash of color to work documents simple.

In a new blog post, the company explains that Workspace users will soon benefit from a new system that simplifies the theme customization process for spreadsheets and presentation decks.

“The theme colors section is now at the top of the color picker, and the ‘theme’ placeholder has now been enhanced to show the name of the theme,” explained Google.

“We hope this new feature will help you customize your presentations in Sheets and Slides and enable you to incorporate your company’s brand colors.”

Google Workspace themes

Under the new system, building out a theme is as simple as navigating to the traditional color-picker dropdown and selecting the edit theme icon in the top-right corner, which will open a tab in the sidebar.

From here, users can select a number of different colors that will later correspond with different elements of the presentation; for example, headers, body text and background accenting. The process will not create a new theme, but rather tweak whichever theme was selected via the dropdown, Google explains.

The idea is to help businesses create consistent branding across external and internal documents (which is more difficult than it sounds for larger organizations), and make it simpler for the people building out these documents to access the correct color palette.

Currently, Sheets and Slides are the only Workspace applications that support themes, but it’s easy to imagine Google expanding the system to include Docs and its other productivity apps in future.

The new color-picker system will roll out incrementally in the coming days and should reach all users by the end of the month.

Joel Khalili
News and Features Editor

Joel Khalili is the News and Features Editor at TechRadar Pro, covering cybersecurity, data privacy, cloud, AI, blockchain, internet infrastructure, 5G, data storage and computing. He's responsible for curating our news content, as well as commissioning and producing features on the technologies that are transforming the way the world does business.