What it does
Fill with Gemini is a feature in Google Sheets that fills cells for you. It reads the context of your table, works out what a new column needs, and fills it — either by dragging like an ordinary autofill, or by typing a plain-English instruction. It expanded to eleven more languages on 7 July 2026, which is why a lot of people are only now seeing it appear. You need Workspace smart features switched on.
The point is that jobs that used to need a fiddly formula — or worse, manual typing down a long column — become a one-line request.
A worked example: categorising expenses
Say column A has a list of supplier names and column B has amounts, and you want column C to sort each row into a category: Travel, Software, Office, or Other.
Add a header called Category at the top of column C. Select the first twenty empty cells under it. When the Fill option appears, paste a prompt like this:
Gemini fills the twenty cells. Notice the two constraints in that prompt: a fixed list of labels, and an instruction on what to do when unsure. Both matter — without them it will happily make up its own categories and you'll spend longer cleaning up than you saved.
Other jobs it's good for
Tidying inconsistent text. A column of job titles written five different ways can be standardised: "rewrite each title in column A in the format Firstname Lastname, Title Case".
Short summaries. If you have a column of long notes, ask for a five-word summary of each in the next column.
Simple sentiment. For a column of customer comments, ask it to label each Positive, Neutral or Negative — again with a fixed list of labels.
Don't run it down a thousand rows in one go. Fill the first twenty, read them properly, and only continue once you're happy the labels are right. Gemini is fast but it is not reading your business the way you do — a supplier you know is Software might look like Office to it. Twenty rows is enough to catch a pattern of mistakes before it repeats them five hundred times.
If you don't see the Fill option
Two things commonly get in the way. First, you need Workspace smart features turned on — if they're off, or your organisation has disabled them, the option simply won't appear. You can check under Tools in Sheets, or ask whoever manages your account. Second, it rolled out gradually and only reached many non-English workspaces in July 2026, so if your account language isn't English, you may have only just received it. If neither is the issue and it's still missing, give it a week or so — gradual rollouts can take a fortnight to reach every account.
Where formulas are still better
Fill with Gemini is for judgement-style tasks — categorising, summarising, tidying messy text. For anything that must be exact and repeatable, like adding up a column or looking up a price, a normal formula is still the right tool, because it gives the same answer every time and doesn't need checking. Use Gemini for the tasks a formula can't easily do, not as a replacement for the ones it does perfectly.
Do this today
Find one spreadsheet where you've got a column you've been meaning to categorise or tidy by hand. Add the new column, select the first twenty cells, and write a prompt with a fixed list of labels using the example above. Check those twenty, then fill the rest. It's the fastest way to feel where this saves you real time.