Drawing the sheet
What it is
Section titled “What it is”The body of an open sheet (values, fills, grid, borders, the selection and the frame of the active cell) is drawn as one picture the size of the visible part of the spreadsheet, rather than as thousands of separate cells. This keeps scrolling a large spreadsheet smooth, and the text sharp at any zoom. Frozen rows and columns, merged cells, the input field, pictures, sparklines, checkboxes and dropdown lists, search highlighting and co-author marks lie on top of the picture and are drawn as ordinary page elements.
How to use it
Section titled “How to use it”- Nothing needs to be turned on: the picture works by itself wherever the browser supports it.
- Scroll the sheet as usual. The mouse wheel scrolls smoothly; a trackpad scrolls right under your fingers. Shift with the wheel scrolls sideways.
- Ctrl/⌘ with the wheel, like Ctrl/⌘ with plus or minus, changes the browser zoom. The browser zoom and the screen scale of the system are taken into account: text, grid lines and sheet borders stay as sharp as the frozen rows. The border of the row and column headers is darker than the grid lines, so it does not disappear at a zoom below 100%.
- Inside the input field and the dropdown lists, the wheel scrolls them while they have room to scroll, and only then the sheet.
- The sheet’s scrollbars are thin: one at the right edge (below the column headers) and one at the bottom (to the right of the row numbers). At rest they are not visible. They appear when the pointer is over the sheet or the sheet has focus. Drag the thumb with the mouse. A click on the bar away from the thumb scrolls one screen in that direction. The bar can be reached with the Tab key and scrolled with the arrows, Page Up and Page Down (by a screen), and Home and End (to the start and to the end). When the sheet fits completely along one side, there is no bar on that side.
Limits
Section titled “Limits”- When printing, and in browsers without support for picture drawing, the sheet is shown as ordinary cells. It looks the same, but works more slowly on large sheets.
- Pixel density is taken into account up to 3 physical pixels per point of the screen. Above that, the picture is drawn as at 3.
- On touch devices there are no scrollbars of their own: the sheet scrolls with a finger as usual. While the sheet moves under the finger, the picture may briefly lag behind the merged cells and the pictures on top of it. After it stops, everything matches.
If something goes wrong
Section titled “If something goes wrong”| What you see on the screen | Why | What to do |
|---|---|---|
| The body text is blurred, while the frozen rows are sharp (browser zoom below or above 100%) | This was the case before the update of 2026-10-12 | Reload the page. If it does not help, tell support your browser and system zoom |
| After scrolling, the borders of neighbouring rows are shifted by a pixel or disappear (browser zoom not 100%) | This was the case before the fix of 2026-10-12 | Reload the page. If it does not help, tell support your browser and system zoom |
| While you drag the scrollbar, fills and frames “drift” relative to the selection | This was the case before the update of 2026-10-12 | Reload the page |
| The sheet is drawn wrongly: garbage, empty stripes, cells not in their places | A failure of the picture drawing | Reload the page. If it repeats, support can switch the picture off in your browser (see below), and the sheet will show ordinary cells |
| When scrolling with a finger on a phone, merged cells tremble slightly relative to the text | A known limitation (see above) | Wait for the sheet to stop. If it gets in the way of work, tell support your phone model |
To switch the picture off in your own browser (for support and checking), run localStorage.setItem('sheet-paint', 'off') in the developer console on the spreadsheet page, and reload the page. To turn it back on, run localStorage.removeItem('sheet-paint').