Google Sheets added two real stock charts in October 2026, High-Low-Close and Open-High-Low-Close. Each one draws a whole period, like a day or a week, as a single marker that shows the highest value, the lowest value and where the period ended. They work for any numbers that move inside a period, not only share prices. The catch is the column order: the new chart reads your columns in a different order from the old candlestick chart.
Last updated 5 November 2026 · by Inam Ul Haq, data analyst and automation engineer · about the author
Before this, the only way to draw something like a stock chart in Sheets was the candlestick chart. Most of the guides that rank today still teach that, usually fed with stock prices from GOOGLEFINANCE. That is fine if you trade shares. But most small businesses I work with never look at a share price, and they still have numbers that swing up and down inside a week.
Think of the price a supplier charges you for one material, logged at every delivery. Or the temperature in a cold room, read several times a day. In both cases the average hides the thing you care about, which is how far it moved and where it ended. A stock chart shows exactly that, and now Sheets has a proper one.
Put your columns in the order Label, Open, High, Low, Close for the new chart, check every row with one formula before you draw it, and do not reuse a table you built for the old candlestick chart without moving its columns.
Same five columns, two charts, and your highest price gets read as the closing price.
Does Google Sheets have stock charts now?
Yes. Google announced them on its Workspace Updates blog on 5 October 2026. There are two new types. High-Low-Close, or HLC, plots the highest value, the lowest value and the closing value for each period. Open-High-Low-Close, or OHLC, adds the opening value, so you can see straight away whether the period ended up or down.
The rollout is gradual. Rapid Release domains started getting it on 5 October 2026 and Scheduled Release domains on 22 October 2026, and Google says it can take up to 15 days to appear. It is available for every Google Workspace customer and for personal Google accounts, and there is no admin setting for it. In Google’s list of chart types it now sits under Stock.
The same post fixes something that annoyed people who share files with Excel users. Before, an Excel file with a stock chart in it lost that chart completely when it was opened in Sheets, and you had to build it again. Google says HLC and OHLC charts are now kept when files move between Excel and Sheets.
I wrote this on 5 November 2026 from Google’s post, Google’s stock chart help page and the Google Charts documentation for the old candlestick chart. I have not drawn the new chart on my own account yet, so I describe what Google documents and I say so where I have not seen it myself.
What does a high-low-close chart actually show?
A normal line chart gives you one point per period, usually an average or a total. A stock chart gives you a small vertical line per period instead. The top of the line is the highest value in that period, the bottom is the lowest, and a short tick sticking out to the right marks the closing value, which is simply the last value of the period.
The OHLC version adds a tick on the left for the opening value, the first one of the period. Now you can read the whole period from one marker. A long line means prices swung a lot. A close tick above the open tick means the period ended higher than it started.
The help page also calls the OHLC marker a candle, with the open and close as its two borders. I have not seen yet whether Sheets draws it as a candle or with ticks, so treat the figure as a way to read the numbers, not as a screenshot.
What order do the columns go in for a stock chart in Google Sheets?
This is where I would expect most broken charts to come from. Google’s stock charts help page says the OHLC chart wants the label in the first column, then Open, High, Low and Close. The HLC chart wants the label, then High, Low and Close.
The old candlestick chart read the same values in a different order. The Google Charts documentation for the candlestick chart gives it as the label, then Low, Open, Close and High. That is the layout most of the candlestick guides still in search results tell you to build.
So what happens if you take a sheet that was built for the old candlestick and point the new OHLC chart at it? I worked it through on one week of example prices: open 432, high 445, low 428, close 436. In the old layout those sit in the columns as 428, 432, 436, 445.
| Column | What you typed (old layout) | What the new OHLC chart reads |
|---|---|---|
| B | Low 428 | Open 428 |
| C | Open 432 | High 432 |
| D | Close 436 | Low 436 |
| E | High 445 | Close 445 |
The new chart now believes the high was 432 and the low was 436, which is impossible because the high sits below the low. Worse, it reads your real high, 445, as the close. Because the old layout always puts the high in the last column, every single period would look like it closed at its peak. That is a chart that tells a client prices only ever went up, and none of it is true.
I have not tested whether Sheets draws that broken table or shows an error. What I can say from the documentation is that the values land in the wrong slots, so the safest habit is to never trust an old table in a new chart.
How do I turn a list of prices into a stock chart table?
Real business data rarely arrives as a neat row per week. It arrives as a log, one row per delivery or one row per reading. So the useful skill is turning that log into one row per period with four numbers. Here is the set of formulas I use, and it works the same way in Sheets and in Excel 365.
Say your log has the date in column A, a week label in column B and the price in column C, sorted from oldest to newest. In a summary table, put each week label once in column F. Then fill G to J like this, with the ranges set to the size of your log.
- 01Open, the first price of the weekIn G2 type =INDEX(FILTER(C$2:C$500,B$2:B$500=F2),1). FILTER keeps only that week’s prices, in date order, and INDEX takes the first one.
- 02High and lowIn H2 type =MAXIFS(C$2:C$500,B$2:B$500,F2) and in I2 type =MINIFS(C$2:C$500,B$2:B$500,F2).
- 03Close, the last price of the weekIn J2 type =INDEX(FILTER(C$2:C$500,B$2:B$500=F2),COUNTIF(B$2:B$500,F2)). COUNTIF counts the week’s rows, so INDEX lands on the last one.
- 04Fill down and select F to JColumns F, G, H, I and J are now Label, Open, High, Low, Close, the order the OHLC chart expects. For HLC, select F and H to J only.
The open and close formulas only work if the log is sorted by date, because first and last mean first and last row. If your log is pasted in from different places, sort it before you trust them. A FILTER that finds no rows returns an error too, which is a useful warning that a week label is typed two different ways.
Here is the example log summarised for four weeks. The prices are made up for this article and the formulas above give exactly these numbers.
| Week (label) | Open | High | Low | Close |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Week 1 | 410 | 430 | 410 | 430 |
| Week 2 | 432 | 445 | 428 | 436 |
| Week 3 | 438 | 452 | 438 | 447 |
| Week 4 | 449 | 449 | 435 | 437 |
Read as a chart, this tells a buyer something an average would hide. Prices climbed for three weeks, and week 4 opened at its high and closed 12 lower. Week 2 swung by 17 inside a single week, which is the week to ask the supplier about.
How do I check a stock chart table before I draw it?
A wrong column order does not give you an error message in a formula, so I add one check column next to the summary. In K2 type =AND(H2>=MAX(G2,J2),I2<=MIN(G2,J2)) and fill it down. Every row must say TRUE, because the high has to be at least as big as the open and the close, and the low has to be at most as big as both.
If any row says FALSE, a column is swapped or a value was typed wrong. On the broken table from section 3, the check fails on the first row, which is exactly what you want. It is the same idea I use for any number a tool hands me, as I explain in how to check the numbers an AI put in your spreadsheet.
If your sheet is set to manual recalculation, the summary can show last week’s numbers while the log already has this week’s rows. Recalculate before you trust the chart, as I describe in Google Sheets manual calculation.
What can I use a stock chart for if I do not trade stocks?
Anything where a value moves inside a period and the end of the period matters. I keep it to cases where the close means something, because a close that is just a random last reading adds noise.
| Your data | Period | Open and close mean | Chart |
|---|---|---|---|
| Price paid per delivery for one material | Week | First and last price you paid | OHLC |
| Exchange rate you pay a supplier in | Day | Rate at start and end of the day | OHLC |
| Cold room temperature readings | Day | Only the closing reading matters | HLC |
| Daily stock level of one product | Week | Monday and Friday counts | OHLC |
| Delivery times per order | Week | Not much, use a box and whisker chart | Neither |
The last row matters. When you want to know how spread out a pile of values is, not where a period started and ended, a box and whisker chart answers the question better. Sheets got one of those in October as well, and I covered the setting that changes it in the Google Sheets box and whisker chart.
Whichever chart you use, give it one plain sentence on top, like “prices rose three weeks running, then fell back in week 4”. The chart is the proof under that sentence, which is how I build any report people actually read, as in how to turn a table of data into a story people follow.
Will the stock chart survive when I send the file to Excel?
Google says HLC and OHLC charts now move between Excel and Sheets in both directions. Excel’s own stock charts have long asked for the same order the new Sheets chart uses, High, Low, Close and Open, High, Low, Close. That is good news, because a table built for the new Sheets chart is already in the shape Excel wants.
I have not taken a file through that round trip myself. So after any move, I would run the TRUE or FALSE check column once more and look at one marker against its row. If the numbers match, the chart came through.
Google Sheets now has High-Low-Close and Open-High-Low-Close stock charts, rolling out from 5 October 2026 to every account. They are useful well beyond share prices: any value that moves inside a day or a week, like a supplier’s price or a cold room’s temperature. The one thing that goes wrong is the column order, because the new OHLC chart reads Open, High, Low, Close, and the old candlestick chart read Low, Open, Close, High.
Build the table as Label, Open, High, Low, Close, add the one TRUE or FALSE check column, and rebuild any old candlestick table instead of pointing the new chart at it.
Sources: Google Workspace Updates, Use stock charts in Sheets to better visualize price movements (5 October 2026); Google Docs Editors Help, Stock charts and Types of charts and graphs in Google Sheets; Google Charts documentation, Candlestick Chart. All read on 5 November 2026. The supplier prices are an example, and the summary numbers were worked out for this article.