Here's how to save a Google sheet . And now saving Google Sheets right off the bat is actually done automatically. But I'm gonna share with you in this video a few ways to back up your sheets, download your sheets, and do interesting things around saving sheets. But first I want to share with you where you actually can see if you are saving your Google sheet. So if I make a change, if I change this cost formula , let's say to a thousand here. It can. You'll see up at the top, it'll say Save to drive. And this cloud button with a little checkbox , a little check mark in it. You can click it and see the document status and see that all changes save to drive. And you can also see this document is not ready for offline use, which

is very interesting 'cause I think offline use is good, but I don't actually use it on this account. I have another account that I use offline. Editing on. So I actually think offline editing is very good. It saves it locally and then it'll update those changes. Once you're actually connected to the internet, you can turn it on for a single Google account. So I have multiple Google accounts. I think for your Chrome account that you're logged in, it has to be the same one, or you can only have one account that actually is, uh, offline use 'cause it's saving on your local drive. But that's really helpful to see the document status right here. It can make another change and you can see it saving. And if I turn off the wifi or the internet access, you can see to edit offline, I need to turn on offline sync. And up here it has a little cloud and it has a X through it.

It says trying to connect. So if I make a change or I try to attempt to make a change, I can't even. 'cause I don't have offline sync on turning my wifi back on. And you'll see all of these disappear once we have connected to the internet. And you can see safe to drive again at the top and a check mark inside of that little cloud. And now I can. Edit and it says saving again. So I wanted to share with you a couple of ways to save Google Sheets in different ways. One is a backup and one is a download to download. You just go to file, download and you have a lot of options. You can download it as an Excel document, open document. I used open office for a long time, 10 plus years ago, 15 years ago. PDF , it'll be saved as a printable object webpage.

You can save the whole thing as H-T-M-L-C-S-V if you just care about the data or tab separated value. Same tab idea. Just the data alone is saved in columns and rows. Very, very helpful to move information around. You can download any of these. You can also take the URL. And go to Better sheets.co/download. Here. You can paste in your URL and it'll generate a bunch of URLs that will immediately do this thing. So like, if you want to download, uh, CSV , this link that would've created, it'll download that sheet as a CSV immediately, or A PDF . There's more options when you want to. Do A PDF here@bettersheets.co slash pdf .

You can enter your URL and check off a bunch of different options, and here you can get a URL for that PDF with all of those options. It's really, really cool to be able to email someone this very specific PDF without actually downloading the PDF and sending to them. You save a lot of space in your drive in your computer. You don't actually have to download the PDF yourself and, and send it. You can have them download it immediate if they have view access to your sheet. I wanna share with you one other thing, which is making a backup. You can go to file, make a copy, and what this does. We're gonna make it a copy and we're gonna call it Backup. Backup. And then the name, we're gonna say, make a copy. And why I put backup is because from this moment on, this sheet has

no history, that this sheet, the original sheet has, it is only, has been created essentially as this. And so. There's two things you can do here. One, you can continue with the original copy, especially if you have collaborators and you're working on this with a lot of other people. You can continue working on this and it's fine, but you have sort of a, a moment in time, this is what the sheet was like. And the other option is that you can continue using the saved the new copy as the one you're editing. And the old copy has all of the history. If we go up to version history , we can see all of the versions here, different versions, all of the edits. But in our backup, let's go to our version history .

There's only one version, this version, so I actually sometimes in some cases, like to make a copy, use the new copy as the. One I'm editing and the old one as the backup because then from the old one, that's got not gonna change anymore and it has all the history and I can always make another copy. The new one I can continue working on and it's sort of like a little branch of history is going off in one direction. I can go back to that original spot and say, okay, I wanna branch off in a different direction. Just an idea to give you those options. We can also do this automatically, meaning make a copy continuously into a Google Drive. I'm gonna call this back up function . Back up getting the whole spreadsheet , file spreadsheet ,

app dot get active spreadsheet . So it's gonna make a copy. We're gonna name it back up, but we're gonna add hyphen and new date. This is a time code string , or date a timestamp . I'm gonna click run, show you exactly what this one line of code does. I do have to review permissions. And so I'm gonna open this file. You can see that it is a backup file and it has says Friday, April 17th. This is the timestamp and it's just right here in my Google Drive. If I wanna put it in a specific folder, you can do file Cons, file. I can do drive app. I'm gonna create a folder called Dr. Backup backup file. Make sure it's only one. And you're gonna do drive app dot, get folders by name next, and this is gonna be your folder. I am gonna do folder dot add.

Actually the add file is deprecated, so we are gonna have to do drive, app dot, get file by id. File dot get. Id got moved to folder, so now when I click Run again, it's gonna create a brand new file. So this file still exists, but it's gonna be named something different because it has a different time. So I'm gonna hit run. I'm gonna need to review permissions again because I'm using Drive App now, and if I go to the folder of backup file, there it is. This is a brand new one. Different time, same day, different time, and I can keep running this as much as I want because it's gonna create a brand new file every single time, put it into this drive, essentially marking moments in time when. This file has been updated or anything. What I like to do when I automate this backup is to go over to triggers.

Go to the bottom right blue button says Add trigger . Choose which function to run. If you have other functions here, you're gonna select it from this dropdown in this file. We have only one. An event source is not from the spreadsheet itself, but actually time driven, and that time is going to be, let's say, every month. So 12 times a year on the first of the month or maybe the 31st of the month after everyone's gone, 9:00 PM to 10:00 PM at that very last moment of the month, I say clicks on through. We're gonna hit save, and we're gonna create a trigger that every single month, again, 12 times a year. This file will be backed up, quote unquote backed up. What it's really doing is to making a copy of your file. If you ever wanna delete this or stop it, you can come back to Extensions app script , go over to triggers, and over on the far right, there's

three buttons that say more options. And you can delete this trigger . You can say delete forever. If you ever wanna stop that, I think this is a great way of saving your Google sheets. I've done this in the past. For a lot of files where lots of people are editing it, and you may want to increase the save time around, you know, something around every week or every couple of days, or every Monday and Friday, for example, to have different save points. But you also do have, and I, I might have shown it to you, but I didn't mention it, you also have version history of every single sheet that you can go back to. You can go back to certain. Versions. And here on the right you can actually name these. So after the day is done, at the end of the day, you're like, ah, we did a

bunch of cool stuff in the sheet, but I wanna, I wanna save this moment in time. Go to the top here and rename this from April 17th. We can say, cool, save point. And now from now on, if I make more changes, I can go back to that point in time. Let me make some changes, like if I delete some of these things, go back to our version history and see that cool safe point is there with our data . I can show unmodified rows there. There's our data . Hey, we deleted stuff after that, but here at this cool safe point, we have it. Yay. We can restore this version . Restore. Yes, we have saved the day. By knowing that there's a version history and by naming a version history ,

so I showed you a bunch of really cool ways to save your Google Sheets, backup files, make a copy switch to new copies, version history , downloads lots of cool ways, and also showed you that it's automatically saving every single time, every single edit. Google is saving this in their large files, large data centers. Really, really cool. Thanks for watching this video. Okay. You are watching better sheets here on YouTube. Make sure you check out this video or this video and subscribe right now to get more tips, tricks, how tos, get more out of your Google sheets than you ever have before. I'm excited to be making a ton more videos here. Ask me questions down in the comments and I will answer them in future videos.

But for right now, right here, one of these videos is gonna be your next Google sheet.