You have a column of customer reviews or survey replies. You want each one tagged Positive, Neutral, or Negative. Then you can filter the angry ones and count the happy ones.
Google Sheets has no native sentiment function. So people reach for one of two workarounds, and both fall short.
The Old Way (Keyword Matching or Apps Script)
The common trick is a keyword list wrapped in nested IF and REGEXMATCH. You list good words and bad words and hope for the best.
=IF(REGEXMATCH(LOWER(A2),"great|love|awesome"),"Positive",IF(REGEXMATCH(LOWER(A2),"bad|hate|terrible"),"Negative","Neutral"))It breaks on real sentences. "Not bad at all" matches the word "bad" and gets tagged Negative. "The app is good but support was terrible" gets one label when it holds two.
The other route is Apps Script that calls an external API. That means writing code, storing an API key, parsing JSON, and chasing timeout errors on every reload. Too much setup for one column.
The FITS Way (Read the Meaning)
FITS puts an AI formula in the cell. You describe the labels you want in plain English. The model reads the whole sentence, including double negatives and sarcasm.
=FITS("Classify the sentiment of this review as Positive, Neutral, or Negative: " & A2)No keyword list, no script, no API key. Drag it down the column and every row gets a clean label.
You can go past three buckets when you need more. Ask for the topic and the tone in the same pass.
=FITS("Give the main complaint topic and a Positive, Neutral, or Negative rating for this feedback: " & A2)When to Use Each
A keyword list is fine when the words are blunt and the volume is huge. For anything human-written, use =FITS() so the score reflects the sentence, not a single word. Categorization is the one job a spreadsheet formula was never built for, and the full set lives in automating Google Sheets tasks you used to need regex for. If your feedback is buried in mixed formatting, clean it first with the normalize data guide. And once every row has a label, roll the counts into an editorial KPI dashboard.
Score Every Review in One Column
FITS puts plain-English AI formulas inside Google Sheets. Tag sentiment, pull topics, and skip the Apps Script setup entirely. Free tier included.