Google has introduced a new machine learning add-on for Google Sheets called Simple ML for Sheets that allows users to take advantage of machine learning capabilities without any programming experience. In this way, ML will be accessible to everyone, not just experts in the field.

Simple ML was developed by the same Google teams that created TensorFlow, a popular open source AI tool that was released in 2015.

Simple ML aims to help scientists, students, small business owners, business analysts, people working in large corporations and anyone who can work with Google Sheets make valuable predictions automatically.

All required of the users is to open the data in Google Sheets and select and execute the task that best describes what we want to achieve, for example, predicting missing values or detecting unusual values. For those of you who are new to machine learning, be aware that these are just statistical predictions and may be incorrect.

Simple ML detects anomalies in data by generating 10 AI models that automatically assess the accuracy of information in a spreadsheet. Simple ML can also be used to identify anomalous data points. And has the ability to analyze data that is stored in Google’s BigQuery, a cloud data warehouse through Google Sheets.

Another advantage is that the models are automatically saved to Google Drive and you can easily share them with the rest of your team. Simple ML is built on top of TensorFlow Decision Forests and this allows you to export Simple ML models into the TensorFlow ecosystem.