There are countless codes, shortcuts, and formulas within Google Sheets that make life within the columns easier and more manageable.
There are also Easter eggs, or hidden gems, waiting for you to discover them.
Twitter designer Paul Stamatiou recently stumbled on a colorful and prideful surprise in the spreadsheet program. When you type “pride” across the columns, the spreadsheet instantly goes from dull to dazzling. Whether or not Paul discovered the trick from Google Sheets developer Ben Collins‘ popular newsletter or not, over three thousand folks favorited Paul’s tweet in just a few days.
Not only does it work if you spell pride in English, but it works in other languages as well, making for a fully inclusive celebration of pride month. Plus, some users have discovered that you can play around with the Easter egg combined with formulas to showcase “pride” diagonally or in other shapes and continue to see the rainbow effect.
You can also simply put:
=ArrayFormula(TRANSPOSE(MID(“PRIDE”,ROW(INDIRECT(“1:”&LEN(“PRIDE”))),1)))
into your A1 cell and you’ll be good to go.
After this discovery, I’m not confident any spreadsheet has a reasonable or logical excuse not to be rainbow. And while this Easter egg is fun and charming, it would be nice to see Google make more of an internal effort. Especially since their issues that arose in 2019 resulting in the company getting dropped from LGBTQ+ Equality Index after failing to remove an extremely controversial app regarding conversion therapy which they have since removed after many groups protested.
Externally, this hidden gem of a rainbow spreadsheet is lovely; sometimes, it’s what’s on the inside that really matters, but we can appreciate the little steps too.