Import an Excel file

You can bring an Excel workbook into Sheets in two ways: import it into a spreadsheet you have open, as new sheets or in place of its content, or convert an .xlsx file stored in Drive into a new spreadsheet.

Import into an open spreadsheet

1. Open the spreadsheet.
2. Click File in the top-left of the menu bar.
3. Click Import….
4. A dialog opens. You can either:
   • Browse your Drive to pick an .xlsx file you have already uploaded, then click Select.
   • Click Upload from device to open a file chooser and pick an .xlsx file from your computer.
5. Choose how the workbook comes in, then click Import:
   • Insert as new sheets adds the workbook's sheets after the ones the spreadsheet has. This is the default.
   • Replace spreadsheet replaces the whole spreadsheet with the workbook.

An Importing xlsx file dialog shows while Sheets loads all the sheets from the workbook. The change is saved automatically.

When you insert, a sheet whose name the spreadsheet already uses gets "(Copy)" added to its name, so Budget comes in as Budget(Copy). Formulas and links from the workbook that point at that sheet follow the new name, so they keep showing the same values.

When you replace, Eigen saves a version of the spreadsheet first, so you can get the previous content back from File → Version history. See See and restore previous versions of a file.

Convert an Excel file in Drive to a new spreadsheet

If you have an .xlsx file sitting in Drive, you can turn it into a Sheets spreadsheet without opening it first. This leaves the original file in place and creates a new spreadsheet alongside it.

1. Open Drive and find the .xlsx file.
2. Right-click the file (or open the ⋮ menu) and choose Convert to Sheet.

Drive creates a new spreadsheet in the same folder and opens it in Sheets.

What carries over

The import reads every sheet in the workbook and preserves:

• Cell values (text, numbers, booleans, and dates)
• Formulas
• Merged cells
• Column widths and row heights
• Cell borders
• Text formatting: bold, italic, underline, strikethrough, font size, and text color, also where one cell mixes several formats
• Fill colors
• Text alignment (horizontal and vertical), text wrapping, and text rotation
• The sheet tab names, colors, and order
• Hidden sheets, which stay hidden until you show them from the View menu
• The gridlines setting (hidden or visible)
• Conditional formatting rules, data validation rules, and hyperlinks
• Named ranges used in formulas and dropdown lists. Sheets puts the cells a name stands for in its place, so =SUM(Sales) comes in as =SUM(Data!$A$1:$A$9) and still adds up those cells after you edit them. The name itself isn't kept.
• Frozen rows and columns, and the range a filter covers (the values ticked in each column's dropdown are not carried over)
• Column, bar, line, and pie charts, with their colors, title, background, and text and line colors, over the same cells as in Excel. A 3-D chart comes in flat. See Add a chart to a spreadsheet.
• Chart sheets, each as a sheet of its own with its chart in the top-left corner
• Images floating over the cells, at the same size and angle, in front of or behind the charts as in Excel. An image in a format Sheets can't show, such as EMF, WMF, or TIFF, is left out. So is every image after the first 1,000, or once the images add up to more than the largest file you can upload (35 MB unless your administrator changed it).

A chart reads its cells, so it changes when you edit them. A chart whose data comes from a named range, from several separate ranges, or from another workbook shows the numbers saved in the file instead, and doesn't change with the cells.

Fonts from Excel are mapped to the four fonts Sheets supports. Common sans-serif fonts (such as Calibri, Arial, and Verdana) map to Inter; serif fonts (such as Times New Roman and Georgia) map to Source Serif 4; monospace fonts (such as Courier New and Consolas) map to JetBrains Mono; Comic Sans maps to Excalifont.

What does not carry over

After an import into an open spreadsheet, a message counts the charts, images, conditional formatting rules, data validation rules, and named ranges that didn't come across, for example "2 charts and 1 conditional format were not imported."

The following are not imported:

• Charts Sheets can't draw the way Excel does, such as area, scatter, doughnut, combo, and waterfall charts. A chart sheet holding one comes in as an empty sheet.
• Conditional formatting rules Sheets has no rule for, such as icon sets
• Data validation rules Sheets has no rule for, such as a custom formula
• Named ranges that point at another workbook, at several separate ranges, or at cells that depend on where the formula is. A formula that uses one keeps the name, and shows an error once it recalculates.
• Images placed inside cells, and shapes such as text boxes
• Comments and notes

If these are important, keep the original .xlsx file in Drive so you have a reference copy.

A password-protected Excel file can't be imported. Open it in Excel, remove the password, save it, and import it again.