Recap From Google Cloud Next ’19 Conference

I’ve recently returned from a fantastic week in San Francisco at Google’s Cloud Next ’19 conference, which is their annual Cloud conference for developers and vendors. It’s a huge event, with some 30,000+ attendees and 500 sessions.

Google made a 122 announcements, including some exciting developments relating to Google Sheets.

Here are the talks from the Google Cloud Next 19 conference that related to Google Sheets:

1. 30 Ways Google Sheets Can Help Your Company Uncover and Share Data Insights

If you only watch one session from next and you’re a Google Sheets user, then I’d recommend this one. It’s really well presented look at the capabilities of Google Sheets in the context of working with data and the Sheets team give plenty of sneak peeks into where the tool is going.

Here are the new features we can expect to see in the future:

Images in cells: allows you to add images anchored inside a cell, not just free-floating, and without needing to use the IMAGE function

Trim Whitespace: natively remove whitespace around data in cells, instead of having to use formulas

Remove Duplicates: natively remove duplicates in Google Sheets without needing to use an add-on or manual formula methods

Slicers: slicers are controls to add filters to pivot tables and charts

Reports & Themes: features to make dashboard reports easier in Sheets

OnPrem data connectors: data connectors to other SQL databases to easily access data from Sheets

Connected sheets: Connected Sheets connect Sheets to BigQuery and use Sheets functionality, like pivot tables, formulas and charts, with millions or even billions of rows of data inside BigQuery. The presenters showed an incredible demonstration of running a pivot table on 128 million rows of data!

View and edit history of individual cells: see how cells have changed over time

Embedding Sheets in Docs and Slides

MS Office Editing: work on Office files straight from G Suite without having to convert file types

Legacy keyboard shortcuts

2. How to Grow a Spreadsheet into an Application

Most of us use spreadsheets beyond simple data tasks. We build to-do lists, address books, scheduling apps, bug trackers, etc. Eventually, however, there comes a time when you need something more robust than a standalone Google Sheet, and this talk explores that journey, from single Google Sheet to full-blown application.

3. How to Simplify Business Processes with G Suite

4. Google Docs: Taking Collaboration Beyond Real Time

5. Open Doors to ML: How AAA Leverages BQML and Google Sheets to Predict Call Volume

An interesting session looking at how AAA uses BigQuery and Machine Learning to create predictive models that everyone can access through the Google Sheets interface. It was fascinating to see how Google Sheets has been positioned as the final step of the big data/machine learning pipelines.

6. Bring Your Favorite Enterprise Apps to G Suite with the New G Suite Add-ons

For Add-On developers, there was a big announcement about the new G Suite Add-Ons, which should make developers lives easier:

The full library of sessions from Google Next 19 can be found over on the Google Cloud Platform and the G Suite channels.

See you at Google Next 20 perhaps?

10 thoughts on “Recap From Google Cloud Next ’19 Conference”

  1. Wow Ben…THANK YOU for your work in reporting from Next 19.

    If Excel users haven’t contracted with you to learn how to migrate to Sheets, now is the time with all of these new features.

    Keep up the great work!

  2. Thanks for posting, Ben. I started freelancing this past year & do a lot of work with Google Sheets, so this will help me to keep up with what’s to come in this area. I really appreciate your posts & wish you continued success doing what you’re doing. Your content is great!

  3. Thanks Ben! Why I can’t see the option of Remove duplicate under “data” options? Is this feature publicly available?

    1. It’s not publicly available yet! Still under development, so this was just a “sneak peek” from the Google team 😉

  4. good content as always, i have one question regarding sheets.

    Is there any performance gain by getting g suite basic or business over the free version?
    i know the script quotas etc are longer but not clear if performance is any better, i have a big sheet that is often struggling on the basic free version. and would snap upgrade if i knew it would help in any way!

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