Formatting the spreadsheet

What it does

The look of the spreadsheet: font and style, colours, borders, alignment, number formats, merged cells, conditional formatting, row and column sizes, freezing, grouping, zoom and the link view mode. The tools are on the panel above the spreadsheet and in the right-click menu. The formatting is saved in the spreadsheet and visible to all co-authors. The zoom is individual for each person.

How to use it

The panel above the spreadsheet is built like Google Sheets: the buttons are grouped, with a divider between groups. From left to right: Undo, Redo, Print and PDF | Currency format (₽), Percent format, Fewer decimal places, More decimal places, Number format (123) | font | size (− field +) | Bold, Italic, Crossed out, Text color | Fill, Borders, Merge cells | Horizontal align, Vertical align, Text wrapping, Text rotation and direction | Insert link, Insert comment, Insert chart, Add a photo to a cell, Spreadsheet data, Σ Insert function | Rows and columns, Clear format | the side-panel buttons Data validation, Conditional formatting, Named ranges and Sheet and range protection. Download spreadsheet stands separately on the right. The buttons that do not fit into the row go into the More tools (⋮) menu as whole groups, not one button at a time: the last group goes first, and in the menu each group is on its own line below a divider. The row is recalculated when the fonts have loaded and when the window becomes wider. After you click a button on the panel, you can keep typing at once; an ordinary button in More closes the menu immediately. On a phone, the row has only Undo, Redo and Agent. Everything else is in More tools, as a list with labels: first the workbook actions (comments, notifications, Version history, access, Download spreadsheet), then the same formatting and insert groups.
Font: the Cell font list: Default, Arial, Calibri, Aptos, Times New Roman, Georgia, Courier New, Noto Sans, Noto Serif. Size: a field with the buttons Decrease size and Increase size (step 1 px). If the selection has different fonts, it says Mixed fonts. A font that came with a paste from another spreadsheet is shown by its name. Choosing any item in the list replaces it.
Style: Bold (Ctrl/⌘+B), Italic (Ctrl/⌘+I), Crossed out (Alt+Shift+5). There is no underline button on the panel, as in Google: Ctrl/⌘+U underlines. A pressed button means the style is already set.
Colours: Text color and Fill. The strip under the icon shows the colour of the selected cell (no colour: an empty frame). The palette has 70 samples; the current colour is marked with a tick. No color removes the colour. The same items are in the right-click menu.
Borders: from All borders to Without borders, plus Border color and Line style. Alt+Shift+7 sets all borders, and Alt+Shift+6 removes them. For how to set and remove frames on merged cells, whole rows and columns, and how they are printed and copied, see Cell borders.
Alignment has four menus, and the icon of each shows the current choice: Horizontal align (left, centre, right); Vertical align (top, middle, bottom, which is the default); Text wrapping: Overflow into adjacent cells, Wrap text (the row height adjusts) or Trim text; Text rotation and direction: Direction, which is By content, From left to right or Right to left; Text rotation, which is Angle with the field Angle, or Vertical; Indent; and Reset rotation and indent.
Number format (the “123” button): Automatic, Number (2 decimal places), Currency (₽, 2 places), Percentage (1 place), Text, Date, Date and time, Other formats…. Next to them on the panel are ₽ Currency format (₽, 2 places) and Percent format (1 place), which set the format with one click and are highlighted if it is already set. Fewer decimal places and More decimal places change the number of decimal places by one.
Other formats… opens a window with 18 ready formats (Accounting, Negative in red, In thousands, Date in words and others) and an example for the value of the current cell. A double-click on a format applies it at once. In the field Custom format, write the code as in Excel: sections separated by “;” (positive; negative; zero; text), a colour as [Red] or [Красный], dates as DD.MM.YYYY or ДД.ММ.ГГГГ, and time as hh:mm or ЧЧ:ММ. Under the field you see “Example: …” or an error. While the code has an error, Apply cannot be clicked. In the English interface, the ready formats are offered with English codes (DD.MM.YYYY, [Red], “K”), and in the Russian one with Russian codes; both kinds of code show the same thing. The Custom format field shows the code as it was saved, so a format from a co-author with another interface language is shown in their notation. A ready format is highlighted in the list for a code written in either of the two languages.
Merge cells works if more than one cell is selected. If there is data in more than one cell, a Warning! appears: only the data of the top-left cell will remain. OK merges the cells, and Cancel does not. The checkbox Do not show for the next 5 minutes removes the question. If the top-left cell is empty, the first filled value ends up in the merge. Photos from all the cells are collected into the merged cell. On a merged cell, the button is called Unmerge cells. Ctrl/⌘+Z restores the earlier data.
Clear format removes all the formatting from the selection. The values stay.
Conditional formatting is a side panel to the right of the sheet, and the sheet next to it stays live. It opens with a button on the toolbar (the button stays pressed), or with the item Conditional formatting… in the right-click menu: for a cell, in More cell actions; for a row or column header, directly in the menu. The form opens the rule of the active cell, and if there is none, a new rule for the selection. The cursor is in the Ranges field. At the top are the list Rules of the sheet in order (when empty, No rules yet) and Add rule. For an open rule, Move up and Move down change the order. A rule from the list selects its first area on the sheet. Below is Ranges: while the cursor is in the field, outline the cells with the mouse, and the address is entered by itself in place of the previous text. Several ranges are written separated by commas, for example A1:A20, C1:C20. The field stops listening to the sheet when you move to another field of the panel, or by Escape and Enter in it. Then comes Rule type:
- Value: a Condition with 15 options (Greater than, Between, The text contains, Cell is empty, and others). For a date, When: Today, Yesterday, Tomorrow, In the last 7 days, In the last 30 days or Exact date. The value is a number, text or a formula starting with “=”;
- Formula: the rule applies when the formula is true. References are counted from the first cell of the range;
- Color scale: points Minimum, Maximum, Number, Percent, Percentile or Formula. The checkbox Midpoint adds a third point. Formatting of the rule: B, I, U and S (bold, italic, underline, strikethrough), Condition text color and Condition fill. Preview shows the result. The checkbox Stop if true is also there. At the bottom of the panel: Delete rule (the bin, only for a saved rule); Cancel, which returns the form to the rule of the selection; and Save, after which the panel stays open and the rule is selected in the list. To close the panel, use Close in the header, press Escape, or click the button again. Only one workbook panel is open on the right: opening another one closes this one, and vice versa (see Spreadsheets (workbooks)).
Row and column sizes: drag the border in the header. The cursor shows the number of pixels, and Escape cancels. A double-click on the border fits the size to the content. On the border, with the keyboard: arrows change the size by 1 px, with Shift by 10 px; Home and End set the smallest and the largest size. If whole rows or columns are selected, all of them change at once. For an exact number, right-click → Row height or Column width → a field in pixels → Apply.
Freezing: right-click on a row number → Freeze up to row N or Unfreeze rows; on a column letter → Freeze up to column X or Unfreeze columns. Freezing goes up to the header on which the menu is open, not up to the selected cell.
Grouping: select rows (or columns), then right-click the header → Group rows (Alt+Shift+→) or Ungroup rows (Alt+Shift+←). For columns, use Group columns and Ungroup columns. A bar appears to the left of the row numbers (above the column letters): the group line, and the +/− button at the total row right after the group. Nested groups have their own bars. The buttons “1”, “2” and so on in the top left corner of the sheet collapse the groups to the chosen level: the top row for row groups, the bottom row for column groups (Show column groups up to level N).
Zoom: the capsule 100 % at the bottom, in the row next to the sheet tabs. The list opens upward: 50, 75, 90, 100, 125, 150 and 200%. Ctrl/⌘+Alt+0 returns to 100%. The zoom is individual for each person and each workbook, and it is remembered in this browser.
Link view mode: in the access window of the spreadsheet, a link with the Viewing role has the checkboxes Copying (on by default) and Watermark (off). Without copying, a guest cannot copy, cut, drag or print, and there is no export button for them. With a watermark, the text DUOSHAO goes over the sheet.

Behaviour and limits

Text in a cell without a set colour is black in the light theme and light in the dark theme. This is the same for the canvas, ordinary, merged and frozen cells. An explicit colour and automatic contrast over a user fill are preserved.
Only those who can edit the spreadsheet can format it. When viewing, the formatting and insert buttons are absent from the panel (Print and PDF stays if the spreadsheet can be copied), and the group buttons are inactive. Zoom is available to everyone.
Font size is a whole number from 8 to 48 px. A cell without a size is shown at 13 px.
Column width is from 40 to 640 px (new columns: 100). Row height is from 20 to 320 px (new rows: 21).
You can freeze up to 10 rows and up to 10 columns, and only if no merged cell crosses the freeze boundary.
A sheet can have up to 20 000 merged cells. A merged cell can have up to 10 photos.
Conditional formatting: up to 500 rules per sheet, up to 100 ranges per rule, and a scale with 2 or 3 points. It changes the style and the colours, but not the borders and not the number format. On a summary sheet, in a version view and in a spreadsheet opened for viewing, there is no panel. On a phone, the panel stands under the sheet at full width and takes up to 45% of the screen height; the list of rules takes up to 20%. The list and the fields scroll together, and Save is always visible.
Groups: up to 8 levels of nesting, and up to 500 row groups and the same number of column groups.
A custom format code can be up to 255 characters and up to 4 sections. Decimal places are from 0 to 9. The names of ready formats and the errors of a format code are in the interface language.
Words inside cells are in the interface language, as is the writing of numbers: in Russian “5 января 2026”, “понедельник”, ИСТИНА and ЛОЖЬ; in English “5 January 2026”, Monday, TRUE and FALSE. The same spreadsheet looks, for each co-author, in their own language. This is only the look. The data itself, the formulas and their results (for example, a month written by the ТЕКСТ function), as well as CSV, TSV and the clipboard, are the same for everyone. In them the words are always Russian.
Rotation: from −90 to 90 degrees, or vertical. Indent: from 0 to 15.
How borders look (a grid line, a double line, the freeze boundary, a border next to a merge) is described in Cell borders.
The selection frame and the moving frame of a copy are visible in the frozen rows too: for a merged frozen row, and for the last frozen row, on all sides, as in the rest of the sheet. A selection that covers frozen and ordinary rows is outlined with one contour: when scrolling, its upper part stays in place together with the frozen rows.
The canvas takes into account direction, rotation and indent. By content chooses the direction by the first letter; digits and punctuation before it do not affect the choice. A positive angle tilts left-to-right text upward, and right-to-left text downward, as in Google Sheets.
Vertical places the characters from top to bottom without rotating the letters themselves. A line break starts a column on the left. Compound emoji remain one character. The indent equals three widths of the digit “0” per unit, and is applied from the start of the writing, taking into account the font and the zoom.
Trimming and rotation limit the drawing to the cell. For long rotated text, fit the row height to the content. The choice of Vertical inside the menu applies before the menu is closed.
The writing direction does not change the chosen physical edge of the alignment. The More tools menu opens again after Escape from a nested rotation menu.
The zoom is remembered for the 50 latest workbooks. In a private browser window, it is remembered only until the page is reloaded.
The copy ban and the watermark apply only to a view link, and work in the browser. The server checks access to the data.

Errors and recovery

What you see on the screen	Why	What to do
Unmerge cells at the freeze boundary	A merge crosses the row or column up to which you are freezing	Unmerge the cells, or freeze up to another row or column
No more than eight levels of nesting	The new group would be the ninth level	Ungroup one of the outer groups
Could not group	The sheet already has 500 groups on this axis	Ungroup the extra groups
Check the ranges in the Conditional formatting panel	The range was not understood	Write addresses of the form A1:B10, separated by commas
Check the rule	The rule is not filled in, the range goes beyond the sheet, or there are already 500 rules	Check the values and the ranges, and delete the unneeded rules
An error under the Custom format field, and Apply cannot be clicked	The code has unclosed quotation marks or brackets, more than 4 sections, or is longer than 255 characters	Fix the code following the hint under the field
The font size reverted to the previous one	A value that is not a whole number, or is outside 8–48, was entered	Enter a whole number from 8 to 48
The group has no +/− button	The total row is hidden by an outer collapsed group	Expand the outer group
Copying not available	The owner of the link has turned off copying	Ask the owner to turn copying on
When printing: Printing unavailable	The same: copying by link is turned off	The same as above