Sometimes when working in Google Sheets, you may want to change your recalculation settings so that formulas refresh either more frequently, or less frequently.
For example, if you are importing financial data and you want your data to refresh so that it is up to date, you may want to update your recalculation settings.
In this tutorial, I will show you how to refresh your formulas in Google Sheets.
Changing your Recalculation Settings
Let’s say for example you are using a Google Finance function where you are importing stock prices or some other financial data. The default recalculation settings in Google Sheets is to recalculate “on change” which means every time something changes in the spreadsheet, the formula is recalcualted.
The problem with this is that when importing numbers, the formulas will never recalculate unless you change the settings in Google Sheets.
Here is how to change the recalculation settings:
1. In the top menu select File
2. Then in the drop-down menu select Spreadsheet settings
3. Select the Calculation tab
4. Select the drop-down box below Recalculation. From here you will find the different settings you can apply: on change, on change and every minute, on change and every hour. I have selected “On change and every minute” in this example.
5. Select Save settings when you are done
Now that I have changed the recalculation settings, every single minute my formulas will auto-refresh to pull the most up-to-date data. You can also set it up to only change every hour by selecting the “On change and every hour” option
Closing Thoughts
Changing your recalculation settings in your spreadsheet is a useful thing to know how to do, especially if you regularly work with imported data where the formulas won’t update automatically.
If you do change your recalculation settings, just be cautious about doing this in large files with many formulas. If you have a large spreadsheet with many formulas in it, changing the settings to recalculate more frequently can really slow down your spreadsheet.
It will take much longer for a large spreadsheet to recalculate, so this may not be a good thing to do in some sheets.
More Google Sheets Tutorials:
Formulas Not Working
How to Use the GOOGLETRANSLATE Function
How to Show Formulas