I’ve started using Google Sheets a lot lately. You can make a link straight to Google Sheets on your desktop or dock so that you can access it more easily. Read on to find out how.

Google Sheets is a spreadsheet similar to Apple Numbers but the great advantage is you can share it with other people online and they don’t need any particular piece of software to be able to access it. Google sheets is not an application for your computer,  it is a website. This means in order to access one of your Google sheets you need to launch a web browser such as Safari or Chrome, and then go to the Google sheets website.

If you use Google Sheets a lot  it can be a bit tedious trying to access it. But you can create a shortcut straight to Google Sheets in your dock so that you can access it more easily.

The way to do this is make a bookmark to the website from within chrome, then drag the bookmark from your bookmark folder to your desktop, then drag this link from your desktop into the dock.

The first step is to get a link to the Google Sheets website onto your desktop. It will look like this:

In Chrome the way to do this is to  navigate to your Google sheets, then save a bookmark to your favourites bar, (Apple ‘D’) and then drag the  bookmark from your favourites bar onto the desktop.  It will create a ‘webloc’  file on the desktop.

In Safari the way to do this is navigate to your Google sheets, then click on the website address in the browser and drag the address to the desktop.

Once you have a ‘webloc’ file  on your desktop you can test it out simply by double-clicking on the icon  and it should take you straight to your Google Sheets page.

You can drag this weblog file to your dock. (Not to the left side of your dock where applications are stored, but to the right side of your dock where folders and files are stored.)

If you drag the webloc file to your dock it will look like this:

webloc in the Dock

Personally I think this looks a bit ugly so I changed the icon to look like Google sheets.  To do this I did a  Google search on ‘Google Sheets Icon’ and it led me to this site:

http://www.iconarchive.com/tag/google-docs

I found a nice google sheets  icon and downloaded the ICNS file and addd it to my link. (See this article for how to change the icon of a file on OS X.)

Now it looks like this:

With a nice icon.

Here’s a simpler way to do it, thanks to Anastasio in the comments!

1. open google sheets on chrome
2. then click on options (the three dots next to your account picture in chrome)
3. select more tools
4. select create shortcut
5. click on “open as window”
6. click on “create”
7. drag the chrome app created to your dock