How to Get More Templates on Google Sheets

The standard Google Sheets template gallery is useful, but after you’ve created a few annual budgets and to-do lists, you’ll likely find its selection a bit limited. If you're looking for something more specific, tailored to your job, or just better designed, you've come to the right place. This article will show you where to find high-quality templates created by others and guide you on how to turn your own best spreadsheets into reusable templates.

Start with the Built-in Template Gallery

Before you go hunting across the web, it's worth knowing how to access the default templates Google provides. They cover the basics well and can be a great foundation for your own custom designs. If you've never looked, you might be surprised by what's waiting for you.

How to Access the Gallery

Reaching the gallery is straightforward. From the Google Sheets homepage (sheets.google.com), you can see a "Template gallery" link in the top banner. Clicking it will expand to show you all the available options sorted by category.

Alternatively, if you're already in a spreadsheet, you can get there by:

Going to File in the top menu.
Clicking New.
Selecting From template gallery.

The templates are grouped into categories like Personal, Work, Project Management, and Education. You'll find everything from calendars and schedulers to project timelines and financial statements. It’s an excellent first stop, but for truly powerful or niche workflows, you'll need to look elsewhere.

Where to Find More Google Sheets Templates

When the standard gallery doesn’t cut it, the internet is your oyster. A massive community of professionals, creators, and businesses share an incredible variety of free and paid templates. Here’s where to look.

1. Specialized Template Websites

Many websites are dedicated entirely to creating and distributing high-quality spreadsheet templates. These are often built by Excel and Google Sheets experts who understand business needs.

Spreadsheet.com: While it’s also a standalone product, their template library includes many that are compatible with or can be recreated in Google Sheets. It's a great source of inspiration for project management, Gantt charts, and CRM dashboards.
Template.net: This site offers a massive library of templates for all kinds of applications, including a large section dedicated to Google Sheets. You can find everything from business proposals to social media calendars.
Sheetgo Blog: Sheetgo specializes in connecting spreadsheets, and their blog often publishes free templates for specific business tasks like inventory management or financial planning.

How to Use These Templates

Most of these third-party templates work the same way. The website will provide a link that leads you to a Google Sheets preview page with a big blue button that says "Use template." Clicking it will automatically create a fresh copy of the template in your own Google Drive, ready for you to use without affecting the original.

2. Marketplaces and Online Communities

Sometimes the best templates come from individual creators who understand a specific niche incredibly well. These communities and marketplaces are gold mines.

Etsy: Don't overlook it! Etsy has become a huge marketplace for digital products, including beautifully designed and highly functional Google Sheets templates. Search for "google sheets budget planner" or "google sheets project tracker," and you’ll find hundreds of options, often for just a few dollars. These are typically created with aesthetics and user-friendliness in mind.
Reddit: Subreddits like r/sheets and r/spreadsheets are fantastic places to find free, user-created templates. People often share templates they've built to solve a personal or professional problem. You can find unique solutions here, but the quality can vary, so it's good to check the comments and test them yourself.
Gumroad and ConvertKit: Many business influencers, finance bloggers, and marketing experts sell or give away their own custom templates on platforms like these as digital products or lead magnets. If you follow creators in a specific field, check their websites to see if they offer any templates.

3. Google Workspace Marketplace Add-ons

The Google Workspace Marketplace extends the capabilities of Sheets, and some add-ons specialize in — you guessed it — templates.

To access it, go to Extensions > Add-ons > Get add-ons from your Google Sheet. Search for "template" and you'll find various tools. Some of these add-ons install a gallery directly into your Sheets interface, giving you a wider selection of professionally made templates on demand. Others are powerful tools that generate custom sheet layouts based on your inputs.

Create and Save Your Own Custom Templates

Hands down, the best way to get a template that's perfect for your needs is to build it yourself. If you find yourself creating the same type of spreadsheet over and over again — like a weekly social media report, a monthly project budget, or a new client onboarding checklist — you should make it a template.

Why Make Your Own?

Perfect Customization: Include only the information you need, in the layout you prefer, with your company's branding.
Consistency: Ensure everyone on your team uses the same format for reports, which makes data much easier to compare and analyze.
Save Time: Stop rebuilding the same structure and formulas from scratch. Your custom template reduces a 30-minute task to 30 seconds.

Step-by-Step: Turning a Spreadsheet into a Reusable Template

Creating your own template is simpler than you think. There are a few different ways to save and share your work so it’s easy for you and your team to reuse.

Method 1: The "Force a Copy" URL Trick

This is arguably the most popular and efficient method for sharing a template without letting anyone accidentally edit your original file.

Create your masterpiece. Open a new Google Sheet and build it out exactly as you want the template to be. Add headers, formulas, formatting, dropdown menus, and placeholder text (e.g., "[Insert Client Name]").
Get the share link. Click the Share button in the top right corner and set the access to "Anyone with the link can view."
Copy the URL from your browser's address bar. It will look something like this:

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1aBcDeFgHiJkLmNoPqRsTuVwXyZaB0cD1eFg/edit#gid=0

Modify the URL. Find the final part that says /edit#gid=0 and replace it with /copy. The new link will look like this:

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1aBcDeFgHiJkLmNoPqRsTuVwXyZaB0cD1eFg/copy

Now, whenever someone clicks that modified link, they will be taken to a page that forces them to make a copy of the sheet in their own Google Drive. Bookmark this link or share it with your team, and you’ve effectively created a template dispenser.

Method 2: The Google Drive "Templates" Folder

If you prefer a more organized approach, you can create a dedicated home for your templates in Google Drive.

Create a new folder in Google Drive named "Templates" (or "Team Templates").
Move all your "master" spreadsheets into this folder.
Share the entire folder with your team. To prevent accidental edits, give them "Viewer" access.

With this setup, your team can find all official templates in one place. When they need to use one, they can open the original file, go to File > Make a copy, and save the new version to their own Drive.

Method 3: Organizational Gallery (Google Workspace Users)

If your organization uses Google Workspace, you have an even more powerful option. Admins can create a custom template gallery that appears right alongside Google’s default templates.

This allows your company to have an official, curated library of templates for invoices, project plans, performance reviews, and more. When an employee goes to create a new sheet, your custom templates will appear right under your company’s name. Talk to your Workspace admin to see if this feature is enabled and how you can submit a sheet to be included.

Tips for Using Templates Safely and Effectively

Before you go all-in on a new template, especially one from an unknown source on the internet, keep these quick tips in mind:

Check What's Under the Hood: Look at the formulas. Are they simple calculations, or are they overly complex and hard to understand? Make sure a template isn't doing anything strange with your data.
Review Connected Scripts: Some advanced templates use Google Apps Script to automate tasks. When you use one, it will ask for permission to run. Only grant permission if you trust the source of the template completely. A malicious script could potentially access your data.
Customize and Improve: Don't treat a template as a final product. Think of it as a starting point. Feel free to tweak it, add your own branding, and adjust the formulas to better fit how you work.

Final Thoughts

Expanding your Google Sheets toolkit beyond the standard templates can dramatically improve your productivity. By searching third-party sites, exploring community marketplaces, creating your own master copies, and sharing them effectively, you can build a library of powerful tools perfectly suited for any task.

Of course, even the best template often requires you to manually pull data from different platforms every week — like pasting Facebook Ads spending into your marketing budget or exporting Shopify sales to your revenue dashboard. At Graphed, we created a way to eliminate that manual work. You can connect your marketing and sales accounts in one click and use natural language to build live dashboards that update in real-time. It turns hours of data wrangling into a 30-second task, so your beautiful templates are always powered by fresh, accurate data without the copy-paste grind.