Google Sheets

What is Google Sheets?

Google Sheets is a free, cloud-based spreadsheet tool that lives in your browser. Everyone in your team can access, edit, and comment on the same sheet simultaneously. For B2B growth teams, it's not a flashy analytics platform: it's the unglamorous workhorse that powers tracking, dashboards, sales pipelines, and data analysis across thousands of growing companies.

Who is it for?

Any B2B growth team, regardless of size. Sheets is useful whether you're a solo founder tracking your first prospects or a growth manager with a £2m revenue target. It's particularly valuable for early-stage companies that can't afford (or don't need) dedicated tools for every function. Teams that do data analysis, sales tracking, content calendars, campaign monitoring, and cohort analysis all use Sheets as their primary analytical tool.

Key features for B2B growth teams

Real-time collaboration: multiple team members can edit, comment, and view changes instantly without version control nightmares

Powerful formulas (VLOOKUP, INDEX-MATCH, IMPORTRANGE) to combine and transform data across sheets and sources

Built-in charts and data visualisation without leaving the spreadsheet

Conditional formatting to highlight trends, thresholds, and anomalies at a glance

Google Apps Script for basic automation: schedule reports, send email summaries, sync data from APIs

Integrations with other Google products (Analytics, Ads, Search Console) and third-party tools via Zapier and direct connectors

Data validation to prevent team members from entering invalid information

Free to use with a Google account; no per-seat licensing

How it fits in your B2B tech stack

Google Sheets acts as the glue and single source of truth. You might pull data from your CRM (Salesforce, HubSpot), analytics (Mixpanel, Amplitude), email platform (Mailchimp), or sales tool (Gong, Chorus) into Sheets, then analyse it together. Many teams use Sheets as the master source for dashboards they share with leadership, since everyone has a Google account and no extra login is required. Some companies build their entire pipeline tracking in Sheets before moving to a dedicated CRM. It's also useful for campaign planning, prospect lists, and revenue forecasting before those activities move to dedicated tools.

Pricing overview

Google Sheets is free. You pay nothing per month, per seat, or per spreadsheet. If you need storage beyond 15GB (which is rare), you upgrade your Google account to £1.99-9.99 per month, but most teams stay on the free tier. This makes Sheets economically unbeatable: you can run complex growth analysis without software costs.

Practical verdict

Google Sheets is not a replacement for proper analytics platforms, CRMs, or marketing automation tools. But it is absolutely essential because it fills gaps between those tools and enables analysis that would otherwise require developer time or expensive business intelligence software. Growth teams that don't use Sheets usually waste time manually compiling reports or moving data between platforms. The main pitfall is over-relying on it: if you find yourself managing a 100-tab spreadsheet with formulas that take five minutes to recalculate, you've outgrown Sheets and should move to a proper database or BI tool. Until that point, Sheets is the most practical, fastest way to get data visibility and answer questions about your growth. Start there, and upgrade to specialised tools only when Sheets becomes the bottleneck.

Google Sheets is a cloud-based spreadsheet application within Google Workspace for entering, organising, and analysing data with formulas, pivot tables, and charts. It is used by founders and small teams for lightweight reporting, manual dashboards, and ad-hoc data analysis rather than as a dedicated product-analytics platform. It is free for personal Google accounts, with paid Workspace tiers adding admin controls, more storage, and BigQuery-connected data.

Google Sheets is Google's browser-based spreadsheet, part of Google Workspace. It does what you expect from a spreadsheet (rows, columns, formulas, charts, pivot tables) but lives entirely in the browser and saves continuously to your Google account, so multiple people can edit the same file at once and see each other's cursors in real time. It connects to the rest of Workspace (Drive, Docs, Gmail) and is scriptable through Apps Script for anyone who wants to automate it.

Where it fits

Sheets is the default home for any number that needs to be shared, edited by more than one person, or kept loosely in one place: lightweight CRMs, content calendars, budget trackers, campaign reporting, ad-hoc analysis, and the dashboard you build before you build the real dashboard. For a small team or a solo operator it is often the fastest way to go from "I have some data" to "I have a view of it", and the sharing model (send a link, set view or edit access) is genuinely frictionless.

It is genuinely for people who value collaboration and accessibility over raw power. It is not the right tool for heavy datasets, complex financial models, or anything that needs to be a real database with relationships and integrity. Once a sheet becomes the system of record for something important, you have usually outgrown it and just not admitted it yet.

The honest take

The strengths are real. Real-time collaboration is excellent, it is free for personal use and bundled into Workspace plans, it works on any device with a browser, and the formula set covers the vast majority of what most people need. Apps Script and the API mean a Sheet can become a small automation hub rather than a dead file. The sharing and version history are better thought-through than most desktop spreadsheets.

The trade-offs are equally real. It slows down noticeably as a sheet grows large, and it is not built for serious data volume. It depends on a connection and a Google account, so it is not where you want anything you cannot afford to lose access to. The flip side of "anyone can edit" is that anyone can edit: an unlocked sheet drifts, formulas get overwritten, and a number that should be live gets pasted in as a hardcoded value. Sheets is also easy to abuse as a database, and that abuse is how fragile, undocumented business processes get built.

INTERVIEW EWOUD: What is your personal verdict on Google Sheets, and what is your star rating out of five?

INTERVIEW EWOUD: Is Google Sheets in your own stack, and if so what do you actually use it for (and where do you reach for something else instead)?

INTERVIEW EWOUD: What is the one line you would tell a peer about Google Sheets?

Lean B2B founders and small teams building manual reports, trackers, and lightweight dashboards without dedicated analytics tooling.