Google is widening Gemini’s reach inside Google Sheets, opening its AI assistant to millions more users and adding support for 28 extra languages, including Russian, Spanish, Portuguese, Japanese, and Arabic. Until now, the more powerful Google Sheets features – like generating tables or complex pivot-style reports from a prompt – had been limited to English-speaking users in the United States. That made it a pretty small club for a tool Google clearly wants to feel global.
The update makes the product less of an English-only demo and more of a practical workplace assistant, especially for international teams that live inside spreadsheets all day. It also gives Google a better shot at staying relevant as rivals push AI deeper into office software, from Microsoft 365 to smaller copilots built for data work. Support for local-language commands is the sort of thing that sounds minor until you try using a spreadsheet assistant that keeps tripping over your language.
How Gemini works in Google Sheets
To use the new features, users need to turn on Google Workspace smart features. After that, a Gemini icon appears in the Sheets side panel, where commands can be entered in the user’s native language. Google says people can ask it to do things like build a project budget tracker or add a profit-calculation formula column.
- Supported languages: 28 additional languages
- Examples mentioned by Google: Russian, Spanish, Portuguese, Japanese, and Arabic
- Requires: Google Workspace smart features
Google Sheets Gemini access
The expanded language support is available to business customers on Business Standard and Business Plus, enterprise users on Enterprise Standard and Enterprise Plus, education users with Google AI Pro for Education, and individual subscribers on Google AI Pro and AI Ultra. That tiered rollout is classic Google: broad in reach, but never quite free.
The bigger story is not just translation. It is Google trying to make Sheets feel less like a form-filling utility and more like an AI workspace people can actually speak to, without switching into English first. If this works smoothly, the next test will be whether users trust Gemini enough to let it build the first draft of the spreadsheet instead of just fixing the one they already broke.