I find that Google Sheets can be an incredible tool for organizing projects — the endless rows and columns let me track and categorize things to my heart’s content. (You should see my byzantine spreadsheet for my family’s personal finances.)
Until recently, though, I’ve run into one major limitation that irked my organizational brain. If I wanted to add hyperlinks to a cell, I could only hyperlink an entire cell instead of hyperlinking individual words inside it. That meant, for example, if I wanted to track interesting links about personal finance in my spreadsheet, I’d have to make individual cells for each one of those hyperlinks, which could quickly fill up way more cells than I’d like.
But earlier this summer, while researching a big story, I must have subconsciously noticed something had changed. I could, at long last, hyperlink as many things as I wanted in one single cell, allowing me to pack even more organization into my handcrafted spreadsheets. The feature was so good — and felt so natural — that I immediately switched to using it as if it had always been there, and didn’t think much more about it.
But today, another Verge staffer excitedly noticed the change, too, sharing it in The Verge’s Slack as a PSA. And then my editor realized that he, like me, has started using it without even thinking about it. It’s just that handy.
Admittedly, my colleagues and I might be a little late to the hyperlinking party. I found a Google support thread discussing the new functionality from May 7th and a YouTube tutorial posted the same day. But perhaps the feature reached my colleagues and I a bit later than May, as Google sometimes rolls out features over time.
We figured we’d share our shared discovery of the feature along to you, dear Verge reader, so you can begin hyperlinking all the things.
