Free Email Alert When Google Sheet Is Edited – Apps Script

An email the moment somebody changes your spreadsheet — telling you which sheet, which cell, what it said before, what it says now, and who did it.

The old value is the point

Plenty of scripts will tell you a sheet was edited. This one sends the value before the change alongside the value after it. That is the difference between knowing something moved and being able to put it back. When a figure in a shared sheet is suddenly wrong and nobody remembers touching it, the email in your inbox holds the original.

Who, and where

Each alert names the spreadsheet, the sheet within it, and the exact column and row that changed, plus the Google account that made the edit. On a file shared with several people that last field is what turns a mystery into a conversation. Clearing a cell counts as an edit too, so deletions are reported rather than slipping through.

Set up with a trigger, not a formula

The script runs from an installable trigger you add in the Apps Script editor: choose the function, set the source to the spreadsheet, the event to on edit, and notifications to immediate. The same trigger can be pointed at other events instead — on change, on open, or on form submit — if you want alerting on something other than cell edits.

Worth knowing before you set it up

Run the function once manually first so Google asks for permission; the trigger cannot fire until that is granted. That first manual run reports a range error because there is no edit to read — this is expected and can be ignored. The walkthrough explains every function line by line, so this doubles as a lesson in how Apps Script triggers actually work.