How to Use Google Sheets and Excel Views Guide Today

Why Excel Temporary Views Matter

Imagine your revenue review call. Sales is filtering by region, marketing wants only current campaigns, finance cares about closed-won deals. In a normal shared workbook, one person’s filter ruins everyone else’s view. Excel’s Sheet View (temporary view) feature fixes this by letting each person create a private lens on the same data.

For business owners, agencies, and marketers, this is gold: you can keep a single source of truth while every role sees exactly what they need. The only catch? Setting up and maintaining those views manually is still repetitive work.

That’s where an AI computer agent, like Simular’s desktop agent, turns a clever feature into a fully automated workflow.

Manual Way #1: Create a Temporary View in Excel

Step 1: Open the shared workbook

1. Store your workbook in SharePoint or OneDrive.
2. Open it in Excel for Microsoft 365, Excel 2021, or Excel for the web.

Step 2: Start a new Sheet View

1. Go to the worksheet you care about.
2. Click View in the ribbon.
3. In Sheet View, choose New.
4. Excel now highlights the sheet (or shows an eye icon) and labels your view as Temporary View.

Step 3: Apply your filters and sorting

1. Click the filter arrows on your table headers.
2. Filter to the segment you care about (e.g., Region = EMEA, Stage = Proposal).
3. Sort by the column that matters (e.g., Close Date, Deal Size).
4. Hide rows or columns that distract you.

Step 4: Save the view for reuse

1. Open the Sheet View dropdown.
2. Click Temporary View, type a meaningful name like AE Pipeline – EMEA, and press Enter.
3. Now you can switch between Default and your custom view anytime.

Pros (Manual)

• Flexible and visual; no code required.
• Great for ad-hoc analysis and small teams.
• Works seamlessly across desktop, web, and mobile once created.

Cons (Manual)

• Repetitive if you need many role-based views.
• Easy to forget naming conventions, leading to view clutter.
• Time-consuming to replicate variations for every client, campaign, or region.

Manual Way #2: Manage and Switch Between Views

Step 1: Switch views on demand

1. Go to View > Sheet View.
2. Pick the view you want (e.g., Marketing – Active Campaigns).
3. Excel instantly reshapes the sheet without touching the underlying data.

Step 2: Clean up old or unused views

1. Click View > Options in the Sheet View group.
2. In the dialog, select any outdated view.
3. Choose Delete or Rename to keep your list organized.

Pros (Manual)

• Lets coauthors work in parallel without stepping on each other.
• Keeps a single shared dataset but multiple perspectives.
• Simple governance: admins can prune views periodically.

Cons (Manual)

• Still relies on humans to remember to switch and clean up.
• New teammates must recreate their favorite views by hand.
• No built-in scheduling or cross-tool mirroring to Google Sheets.

Automated Way #1: Use a Simular AI Agent to Maintain Views

Now picture this instead: you describe your ideal views once, and an AI computer agent does the clicking for you, every day.

With Simular’s computer-use agent (via Sai), you can:

• Open Excel in the browser from SharePoint or OneDrive.
• Navigate to the correct workbook and worksheet.
• Enter Sheet View, create new temporary views, apply filters/sorts, and save them with consistent names.
• Export or replicate similar logic in Google Sheets for downstream dashboards.

High-Level Setup

1. Record or describe the workflow: Show the agent how you open the file, create a new view, apply filters, and name it.
2. Turn the steps into a reusable task: The agent converts UI actions into a transparent, editable script.
3. Schedule or trigger via webhook: For example, every morning at 7am after your CRM sync finishes.

Pros (Automated)

• Eliminates daily repetitive clicks.
• Guarantees consistent naming and filter logic across teams and clients.
• Can chain multiple tools: CRM → Excel temporary view → Google Sheets summary.

Cons (Automated)

• Requires an initial setup and a small amount of process thinking.
• Best suited for recurring workflows, not one-off experiments.

Automated Way #2: Cross-Tool Views With Excel and Google Sheets

Many agencies and sales orgs track raw data in Excel (for compliance or legacy reasons) but share dashboards in Google Sheets.

A Simular AI agent can:

1. Refresh Excel data from your source system.
2. Apply or update temporary views for internal analysts (e.g., by rep, by product line).
3. Copy the filtered subset or summary metrics into a connected Google Sheets workbook.
4. Format Sheets (headers, number formats, conditional colors) so clients see a polished snapshot.

The result: Excel stays your robust internal engine; Google Sheets becomes your shareable front-end, and the AI agent quietly keeps both in sync.

When to Stay Manual vs. When to Use an AI Agent

Stay manual when:

• You’re exploring a new dataset for the first time.
• Only one or two people need occasional custom views.
• The structure of your workbook changes daily.

Use an AI agent when:

• You rebuild similar Sheet Views every week or for every client.
• Your team constantly asks for updated slices of the same dataset.
• You already live in both Excel and Google Sheets and hate copy-paste.

Temporary views solve the collaboration problem. An AI agent solves the repetition problem. Pair them, and you get a reporting system that quietly maintains itself while you focus on decisions, not filters.