Gemini in Google Workspace · Lesson 5 of 7

Gemini in Sheets and Meet: organize, analyze, take notes

20 minutes. Turn a messy list into a clean table, ask questions of your numbers, and let Meet take the notes.

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Every small business has the spreadsheet. The one with merged cells, three different date formats and a column labeled "misc." And every small business has the meeting where everyone agreed on something, and nobody wrote it down.

This lesson covers both. Gemini in Sheets helps you organize and understand your numbers. Gemini in Meet takes notes so you can pay attention.

Open it

Google's help: open a spreadsheet on your computer and, at the top right, click Ask Gemini.

One tip from Google first: Gemini "works best with native Google Sheets files." If your file is an Excel file (.xlsx), convert it first with File > Save as Google Sheets. Work on the converted copy.

Organize: build a clean table

Google's help says Gemini can create tables, and can do common spreadsheet jobs when you ask: sort and filter, apply conditional formatting, add dropdowns, create pivot tables, find and replace, format numbers, and insert, delete or freeze rows and columns.

At our fictional Comfort Zone Heating & Cooling, Tanya has a sheet of this month's service calls typed in by three different people. She tries:

• "Sort this by date, oldest first, and freeze the header row."
• "Format the Amount column as dollars."
• "Highlight any row where Status is 'Callback needed' in light yellow."
• "Add a dropdown to the Status column with these options: Scheduled, Done, Callback needed, Invoiced."

Each one would take a few minutes by hand. With Gemini, it takes seconds.

Work on a copy the first time. Make a copy of the sheet and practice there until you trust what it does to your data.

Analyze: ask questions of your numbers

This is the part most people never try. Google's help lists prompts like "Identify trends in this table" and "Create a chart with date on the x-axis and total on the y-axis." Tanya asks:

• "Which technician had the most callbacks this month?"
• "What's the average invoice amount for furnace tune-ups versus AC tune-ups?"
• "Create a pivot table of total revenue by service type."
• "Create a chart of jobs per week for the last three months."

Check the math

Gemini is good at this, but not perfect. For any number you'll act on (a price change, a bonus, a decision about a technician), check it one simple way:

• Spot-check one row. Pick one technician or one week and count it by hand.
• Check the total. If Gemini says "total revenue by service type," the service types should add up to the total of the whole column.
• Ask how. "Which formula did you use, and which rows did you include?" If the answer leaves out rows it shouldn't, the numbers are wrong.

Google's help also says your Gemini conversation in Sheets isn't saved, and it's lost when you reload or reopen the file. If a chart or table is worth keeping, make sure it's in the sheet before you close it.

How it works

Google's Meet help describes it this way: after you join a meeting, click Take notes for me at the top right. Gemini writes notes into a Google Doc while the meeting runs.

The facts worth knowing, all from Google's help:

• Everyone is told. Meet "informs all meeting participants that notes are being taken," and a pencil icon appears on everyone's screen.
• Who can start it: the meeting organizer and participants from the host's organization. When host controls are on, only the organizer, hosts and co-hosts.
• Where the notes go: a Google Doc in the meeting organizer's Drive, in a folder called Google Meet, with a subfolder for that meeting. The notes are also attached to the Google Calendar event.
• Who gets them: hosts and co-hosts choose. The options are all invited guests (including people outside your organization), invited guests in your organization only, or hosts and co-hosts only. The people you pick get an email with access after the meeting.
• What's in them: a short "Quick notes" tab with the main takeaways and action items, and a "Full notes" tab with a summary, decisions, action items and details.
• When it works best: meetings of 15 minutes to 8 hours, in one of the supported languages: English, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Portuguese or Spanish.
• It can be wrong. Google says notes may be "incomplete, inaccurate, or not generated," for example on a bad connection or a very short meeting.

Three rules for your business

• Tell people before you start. Meet tells them too, but say it out loud: "I'm turning on Gemini notes. Any objection?" It's courteous, and some customers will prefer you didn't.
• Pick the sharing on purpose. For an internal huddle, "invited guests in my organization" is usually right. For a customer meeting, think before choosing "all invited guests." Notes can include things said in passing that you wouldn't put in writing to a customer.
• Read the notes before you rely on them. Check the action items and who owns each one. Fix the doc. That fixed doc becomes the record.

Skip it for these

Turn notes off, or don't turn them on, for conversations about an employee's performance or health, a legal matter, or anything you wouldn't want saved in a document. When in doubt, a person takes notes by hand.

• Make a copy of one real, messy spreadsheet. Use Gemini to sort it, format it and add one dropdown.
• Ask it three questions about your numbers. Check one answer by hand.
• Turn on Take notes for me in your next internal meeting of 15 minutes or more. Tell people first.
• After the meeting, read the notes, fix anything wrong, and confirm the action items.
• Add your best Sheets prompt to your Gemini Prompt Card.

Check it worked

• One real spreadsheet is cleaner than it was this morning.
• You checked at least one Gemini answer by hand, and you know whether it was right.
• One meeting has Gemini notes that a person read and corrected.
• You know where the notes live (the organizer's Drive, Google Meet folder) and who received them.

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Next: stop retyping the same instructions. Save them once.

→ Lesson 6: Gems, skills and prompts that work

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