Google Sheets dark mode: what Google offers on each device

On the phone: Google’s theme setting

Google’s page, “Use Dark theme in Google Docs, Sheets & Slides”, says you can change the theme setting to make it easier to view documents, presentations and spreadsheets on your mobile device, and that collaborators cannot see the theme you choose. On an Android phone or tablet, open the Docs, Sheets or Slides app, tap Menu at the top left, tap Settings, tap Choose theme and pick Dark, Light or System default. On an iPhone or iPad the steps are Menu, Settings, Theme, with the same three choices.

The page adds that dark theme adjusts your documents and sheets automatically to fit, and that you can preview how a document or sheet looks in light theme for collaborators: open it in the Docs or Sheets app, tap More at the top right and tap View in light theme. That preview does not change your own setting. Google’s Workspace Updates blog announced the iOS version in September 2020, after Android, and said it respects the iOS system settings and can be enabled or disabled in each app under Menu, Settings, Theme.

On a computer: what Google’s pages cover

The Google page on dark theme gives the same text under its Computer tab as under the phone tabs, which is to say it describes the phone apps only. We did not find a Sheets setting for the web on it. Two further Google pages are close but are not about Sheets. Google Drive Help says that to turn Dark Mode for the web on or off in Drive you go to Google Drive on a computer, click Settings at the upper right and, under Appearance, choose Light, Dark or Device default. Google Chrome Help says that in Dark mode your homepage, toolbar and settings, and a few further pages, will be dark; you choose it under Customize Chrome, Appearance, or let Chrome follow the device.

The guides agree on the web version. Night Eye, whose page is for its own extension, says Sheets has native dark mode in its Android, iPhone and iPad apps and that on the desktop the web app does not currently provide an equivalent native setting. Bushe, which offers an extension called Modern Dark Mode, says the mobile app supports dark mode and the desktop version does not. Sheetify says the web version has no built-in dark mode feature. Sheetgo, the odd one out, says the theme is available for mobile and desktop devices and then that it is not currently available for desktop.

The workarounds, and what they do to a sheet

Two routes recur. The first is a browser extension. Bushe explains why Sheets is hard: it uses cell background colours, conditional formatting and chart palettes that assume a white sheet, so inverting the page would invert those colours too, and a working dark mode needs to darken the toolbars, menus and sidebars without inverting the cells. It presents its own extension as doing that. Night Eye presents its extension as making the interface and the workspace dark. Both pages are written by the maker of the extension they recommend, and we did not install or test either.

The second is Chrome’s experimental flag. Bushe names chrome://flags/#enable-force-dark, called Auto Dark Mode for Web Contents, and calls it the wrong tool for Sheets because it inverts everything, including cell colours and conditional formatting; it tells readers who enabled it and see a broken sheet to set it back to Default or Disabled. Night Eye also says experimental browser flags are not the recommended solution because they can change or invert spreadsheet colours unpredictably. Sheetify lists using Chrome’s dark mode as its first option and an extension as its second.

The questions people ask

The people-also-ask box asks whether there is a dark mode for Sheets on the desktop, how to turn it on, why there is none, and whether sheets have one. On what we read: the apps have a theme setting and the web version has no setting on Google’s pages. Bushe’s reason for the absence, that inverting colours would break cell formatting, conditional rules and charts, is its own explanation, not Google’s. For other Google Docs menus, see the page on adding a page in Google Docs; for Sheets itself, sorting in Google Sheets.