Renaming a Spreadsheet

by Allen Wyatt
(last updated August 31, 2013)

1

If you want to change your name, you generally have to go through some sort of legal process such as getting married or making your case before a judge. Renaming spreadsheets is nowhere near as difficult (thank goodness). There are actually two ways you can do it, using both Sheets and Drive.

To rename a spreadsheet using Sheets, follow these steps:

  1. Click the spreadsheet name, in the upper-left corner of the Sheets interface. Sheets presents a dialog box where you can enter a new name. (See Figure 1.)

    2. Figure 1. Changing a spreadsheet's name.

  2. Replace the current name with the name you want to use.
  3. Click OK.

That's it; Sheets changes the name shown at the upper-left of the screen and saves the spreadsheet under the new name.

You can also rename your spreadsheets in Drive. To do this, follow these steps:

  1. Log into Google Drive (drive.google.com).
  2. Locate the spreadsheet you want to rename. (Your spreadsheets should be listed in the main Drive screen, but feel free to traverse any of your folders to locate the spreadsheet.)
  3. Select the checkbox to the left of the spreadsheet name.
  4. Click the More button. (Make sure you click the one at the top of the screen, not the More link that may be at the left of the screen.) Drive presents a number of options you can choose.
  5. Click Rename. Drive presents a dialog box where you can enter a new name. (This is essentially the same dialog box you saw when renaming in Sheets.)
  6. Replace the current name with the name you want to use.
  7. Click OK.

Author Bio

Allen Wyatt

With more than 50 non-fiction books and numerous magazine articles to his credit, Allen Wyatt is an internationally recognized author. He is president of Sharon Parq Associates, a computer and publishing services company. ...

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Comments

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What is 8 + 6?

2013-09-03 16:56:51

Jerry Stinson

I've only begun using Sheets, and it does look handy. But . . . a couple of complaints that Google ought to address.

1. If I create a spreadsheet and want to run calendar dates across the top row, there's no convenient way to then shrink the column widths, because the dates themselves take up too much space. I can't shorten each date by leaving off the year; the program outmaneuvers me and puts it back in! And I can't rotate the text in the date row by 90 degrees (as I CAN do in Excel). If I could rotate text, I could then shrink column width substantially. When the rows below that date row contain only small numbers, shrinkage of columns is to be desired.

2. The default number of columns is 20, and the only way I found to increase that number significantly is to select lots of columns (all 20, for instance), then right-click, then choose Insert 20 right or Insert 20 left. This isn't all that difficult, and I am able to then select a larger quantity of columns (all 40, let's say) and do more Inserts, so it's a tolerable situation. But . . . why such a low default number? And . . . is this trick explained anywhere in Google tutorials? The only reason I found a solution is that I Googled my helplessness!

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