Google Sheets is the spreadsheet in Google Workspace, a suite Google says is trusted by more than 3 billion users and over 11 million paying customers. Several people can work in the same sheet at once, each with their own permissions.
For a lot of small businesses, it’s where the numbers their other systems don’t hold end up: a stock count, a supplier price list, a staff rota, the report someone rebuilds every Monday.
Built for working together
A sheet can be shared with up to 600 people by email and edited from up to 100 tabs or devices at once. Version history lets anyone with edit access see and restore earlier versions, so a bad paste is never final.
It got bigger this year, too. Google doubled the limit to 20 million cells per spreadsheet in September 2026, after making large sheets faster to open and filter in April.
On eligible Workspace plans, Gemini builds tables, formulas, charts and pivot tables from a plain request, and the AI function can summarize or sort text cell by cell. Claude’s Google Workspace connectors can read sheets stored in Drive, and a beta Sheets connector edits a sheet live beside the chat.
Apps Script
Every sheet comes with Apps Script, Google’s scripting platform. A script attached to a sheet can tidy data as it’s entered, build a report on a timer, or send rows to another system. Its triggers and quotas are covered on the Google Apps Script page.
The Sheets API
Other systems reach a sheet through the Google Sheets API. Each project gets 300 reads and 300 writes a minute, with 60 of each per user and no daily cap. A request over the limit is asked to wait, and the integration retries a moment later.
Changes travel outward through Apps Script triggers, or through Drive notifications that say a file has changed.
Getting Shopify orders into a sheet, line by line
A Shopify order can hold several products, each one a line item, so a sheet needs either a row per order or a row per item. Shopify’s own order export takes the second route: each extra line item gets a row of its own, with the order-level fields left blank.
Shopify Flow, the automation tool built into Shopify, has an Add row to spreadsheet action that writes one row at a time, and a For each step that repeats it for every line item. Flow splits columns at commas, so a customer note with a comma in it spills into the next column unless the commas are stripped first.
Adding rows is the easy half. When an order is refunded or shipped, its rows have to change, which means finding them first. The Sheets API can tag a row with developer metadata, such as the order number, and look it up by that tag later, so the link holds even after people have edited the sheet around it.
When several automations share one sheet
Edits made by a script or through the API don’t set off a sheet’s own triggers. Google’s example is a script writing to a cell, which never fires onEdit. An automation that waits for edits through those triggers won’t hear about rows another automation writes.
The API limits are counted per Google Cloud project, the app a connection signs in through, rather than per spreadsheet. Two tools writing to one sheet each spend their own project’s allowance, and a connector that signs every customer in through its own project spreads that allowance across all of them. Some tools, Make among them, let a business connect Google through a Cloud project of its own.
Tables give each column a type. A column set to Date or Number shows a warning on any cell that doesn’t fit, so a feed that starts writing text into a price column stands out.
When a spreadsheet becomes the database
Sheets is often where a business’s numbers meet, which makes it a natural place to connect. Orders from Shopify, costs from the accounts and stock from the warehouse system can feed one sheet that people read, while edits made in it, like a new price or a corrected count, travel back to the system that owns them.
A sheet works best as the place people read the numbers, fed by the systems that hold them. If one is already doing a job between two systems, the signs of outgrowing low-code automation are worth a look, and the ROI arithmetic shows what a sturdier link is worth.