What happened
Google announced two Sheets improvements on August 11 aimed at one of the oldest annoyances in office software: what happens to an Excel file when you open it in Google Sheets. Excel tables now import as native Sheets tables rather than flattening into plain cell ranges, so the structure, formatting behavior, and referencing that make tables useful survive the trip. More significantly, Sheets now supports importing Excel pivot tables that are backed by table ranges as linked pivot tables — meaning they stay dynamically connected to their source data instead of arriving as a frozen snapshot. Table imports are available immediately for all users; the linked pivot table capability began a gradual rollout on August 11, reaching accounts over roughly 15 days. Both changes cover all Google Workspace customers and personal Google accounts, with no admin setup required. The same day, Google shipped usability upgrades to Connected Sheets for BigQuery, adding list parameters and column aliasing for teams that analyze warehouse data from a spreadsheet.
Why it matters for your business
Plenty of small businesses live in both worlds: the bookkeeper works in Excel, the team collaborates in Google Workspace, and files bounce between them constantly. Until now, every bounce risked broken pivot tables and hand-rebuilt formatting — quiet time losses that add up across a month of reporting. If your firm has stayed on pricier tooling mainly because spreadsheet conversions were unreliable, this narrows that gap. It is also a reminder that Workspace ships improvements continuously; someone on your team should skim the update announcements occasionally, because features you already pay for often solve problems you are still working around manually. No action is needed to get these changes — they arrive automatically.