Google Sheets can now sort and filter cells by text or fill color

Damien Wilde | Mar 12 2020 - 6:33 am PT

Google Sheets is now gaining a new feature that allows you to filter and sort cells by text color and fill (background) color.

The new usability addition was confirmed in an official G Suite blog post, with the feature rolling out right now. It should be available by default when using the spreadsheet creation tool, with the color sorting just a click away.

This addition should give you parity with Microsoft Excel — which has had this option for quite some time already — making it far easier to migrate files between the office software packages.

To use this Google Sheets new color sorting, you need to right-click, select Filter > Filter by Color and then select “Fill color” or “Text color”. Any matching cells will be displayed at the top of the range for even easier access. You get granular with extra sorts using any other existing filters within columns and rows too, making this incredibly useful every day.

The option will definitely be useful for large datasets and spreadsheets that are tagged with color to help individual cells become more visible — especially in collaborative files. It’s an incremental change that should help those transitioning from other office packages that bit easier though.

These new sorting options should be rolling out over the next couple of weeks, with Google confirming that it should be available to all users from March 23 onwards. G Suite customers will start seeing the option appearing from today.

If you want to learn more about filters and sorting, Google has some excellent guides and tutorials to help you enhance your workflow with Sheets.