Google Chat and Sheets get significant improvements in latest updates

Google updates some of its apps every week, and this time around two of the search giant’s most popular apps, Chat and Sheets, are getting some major improvements via updates. Although these improvements might not concern everyone, they feel like major achievements for both apps.

Let’s start with Google Chat, which has just received support for 500,000 members. Yes, you read it right. Spaces in Google Chat can have up to 500,000 members starting today.

This is especially important for very big organizations that want to make major announcements that concern every employee. Obviously, it will take some time to populate a space with so many members, so here is how long companies will have to wait for all (or most) of their employees to pop up in a Google Chat space:

• 100 members: 10 seconds
• 1,000 members: 1 minute
• 150,000 members: 45 minutes
• 500,000 members: 150 minutes

The upgrade to 500,000 members is an incredible milestone considering that last year Google increased the number of users organizations can add to a space from 8,000 to 50,000. The jump to half a million people is quite impressive.

The updated version of Google Chat will be rolled out in waves starting on June 26, and it will take up to 15 days to be visible to everyone. This one is available to all Google Workspace customers.

Moving on to Sheets, Google managed to improve the calculation speed in this app by a lot. The Mountain View company claims that it had doubled the speed of calculation in Google Sheets on Google Chrome and Microsoft Edge browsers.

The latest Sheets update improves the speed of actions, including formulas, pivot tables, conditional formatting, and more, regardless of the file size.

The improvements are already available for all users, including Google Workspace customers, Workspace Individual Subscribers, and users with personal Google accounts.