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Sometimes you may have a need for Google sheets to keep refreshing themselves after a certain time interval.
For example, if you’re tracking stock prices in Google Sheets or if you’re tracking currency conversions, then you may want Google Sheets to keep on updating every minute and showing you the latest values.
While you can force a recalculation by making a simple change in the Google sheets (such as editing a cell or deleting one), this is not an ideal solution.
In this Google sheets tutorial, I will show you how to auto-refresh formulas in Google Sheets so that it automatically updates every minute (on every hour if you need that setting)
So let’s get started!
Table of Contents
How to Auto Refresh Google Sheets Every 1 Minute
Below I have a data set where I have the currency conversion from USD to various different currencies.
I’ve got these values using the below Google finance formula:
=GOOGLEFINANCE("CURRENCY:"&"USD"&A2)
Here are the steps you need to take to make sure that this formlas refreshes every one minute in Google Sheets:
- Click the File option
- In the drop-down, click on ‘Spreadsheet settings’
- In the ‘Settings for this spreadsheet’ box, click on the ‘Calculation’ tab
- Click on the Recalculation drop-down
- Select ‘On change and every minute’
- Click on ‘Save settings’
The above steps would change the setting of the spreadsheet so that it recalculates every minute as well as whenever you make any change in the worksheet.
In case you want to auto-update the Google Sheets document every hour (instead of every minute), then you can choose that setting from the dropdown in step 5.
When Not to Enable Auto Refresh
When you enable this setting, every minute Google Sheets is going to refresh the sheet and all the formulas would be re-calculated. why you may not see the change in every formula (as they may have the same value), volatile formulas such as NOW or RAND or RANDBETWEEN would recalculate every time.
If you have a small data set with less number of formulas, auto-refreshing your worksheet every one minute is not going to impact the performance.
But if you have a worksheet with a lot of formulas (especially long convoluted formulas using the kind of VLOOKUP, INDEX, or INDIRECT), you may see some lag in the performance.
So if you have a large spreadsheet with a lot of formulas, it is advisable to not enable this setting. you can try it out if you want, and if it doesn’t work out for you you can disable this setting.
And just to be on the safe side, take a backup before you try it out.
So this is how you can easily enable auto-update in Google Sheets so that it refreshes every one minute or every one hour.
I hope you found this tutorial useful.
Other Google Sheets tutorial you may also like
- How to Generate Random Numbers in Google Sheets?
- How to Insert Google Sheets in Google Docs (that Updates Automatically)
- 10 Easy Ways to Speed Up Slow Google Sheets
- How to Insert a Timestamp in Google Sheets
