Google just made one of the most dreaded parts of spreadsheet work – filling in data row by row, cell by cell – a whole lot less painful. The company officially rolled out “Fill with Gemini” in Google Sheets on April 22, 2026, and it’s exactly the kind of quality-of-life upgrade that anyone who’s ever stared down a 500-row spreadsheet will genuinely appreciate.

If you’ve spent any meaningful time in Google Sheets, you already know the grind. You’ve got a table that needs product descriptions, customer feedback categorized by theme, or a college application tracker with deadline and tuition info for 30 schools – and someone has to fill all of that in. That someone is usually you, and it usually takes forever. Fill with Gemini is Google’s answer to that problem, and according to their own internal study, it’s not a small improvement. Google says the feature lets users populate data nine times faster than manual entry on a 100-cell task – a figure based on a 95-participant study they ran internally.

The feature works in two ways, and both are pretty intuitive. The first is a drag-and-drop approach – if you’ve already filled in at least one cell in a column, you can drag from that starting point and Gemini will read the context of the whole table and fill the rest of the column for you. The second method is prompt-based, where you select a range of empty cells and click a “Fill” entry point, which lets you either let Gemini auto-complete based on existing context or write a custom prompt describing exactly what you want in those cells. So whether you want Gemini to categorize customer feedback by sentiment or generate product descriptions from a list of item names, it handles both without you needing to write a single formula.

This is a bigger deal than it might sound at first. For years, the alternative to manual data entry in Sheets has been building formulas – and while Google Sheets formulas are powerful, they’ve always had a steep learning curve for non-technical users. The new =AI() function that Google introduced earlier this year already started pushing Gemini’s capabilities deeper into cells, allowing things like text generation, sentiment analysis, and data extraction directly from formulas. Fill with Gemini takes that same intelligence and wraps it in a much friendlier interface – no formula knowledge required.

Google has been steadily expanding Gemini’s footprint across Workspace throughout early 2026. Back in March, the company announced a broader wave of Gemini-powered features for Docs, Sheets, Slides, and Drive – including the ability to generate fully formatted first drafts and sheets from information pulled from Gmail, Chat, and Drive. Fill with Gemini is the natural follow-up to those moves, going deeper into the actual data-wrangling workflow that Sheets users deal with every day. The Gemini sidebar in Sheets already gave users a conversational way to analyze data – asking things like “what’s the trend in sales over the last six months?” – but Fill with Gemini brings that intelligence directly to the cells themselves, without requiring a sidebar prompt.

The practical use cases here are broad. Google specifically calls out marketing teams using it to generate suggested responses based on customer feedback, and small business owners filling out product details just by describing what they need. But the real power is in the more tedious, time-consuming tasks – think importing data from the web into a table (like pulling tuition and application deadlines for a list of colleges), categorizing large batches of open-ended survey responses, or standardizing messy data pulled from a CRM or vendor list. These are tasks that previously either required a formula expert or hours of copy-pasting, and now they can be done in a few clicks.

On the admin side, the feature is tied into Google Workspace’s existing smart features settings, so IT admins who have Smart Features disabled for their organization won’t see Fill with Gemini show up. For end users, the feature is on by default for eligible accounts, and you trigger it simply by dragging a selection or clicking into an empty cell range. Google is also running a promotional period through July 15, 2026, giving Workspace customers higher usage limits for the AI function in Sheets during that window – after which per-user limits will kick in.

Availability is rolling out in stages. Users on Rapid Release domains started seeing it from April 22, with the rollout taking up to 15 days to reach everyone. Scheduled Release domains will follow starting May 6. In terms of plans, it’s available for Business Standard and Plus, Enterprise Standard and Plus, and on the consumer side for Google AI Pro and Ultra subscribers. The AI Add-on tiers – AI Expanded Access, AI Ultra Access, and Google AI Pro for Education – are also included.

Google’s broader strategy here is increasingly clear – they want Workspace to feel less like a collection of productivity apps and more like an intelligent assistant that lives inside those apps. Fill with Gemini isn’t a flashy AI demo; it’s a practical, workflow-level feature that targets the exact kind of repetitive, low-value work that eats up hours in any data-heavy role. And if that nine times faster claim holds up in real-world use, it might just become one of the most-used Gemini features Google has shipped to date.