No spreadsheet experience needed.

You do not have to know Google Sheets to use this.

This page goes the whole way, from not having a spreadsheet open to reading your first answer. It skips nothing.

If you already live in spreadsheets, here is the short version and you can stop reading. Install it from the Marketplace, open Extensions, then Sortia, then Open Sortia, and load a template.

Seven steps. About fifteen minutes. Nothing on this page costs anything.

Install free Skip to loading a model

What you need.

A Google account. If you use Gmail, you already have one.
A browser. There is nothing to download and nothing to set up on your computer.

That is the whole list.

First, get Sortia into a spreadsheet.

Two steps, and the second one is mostly clicking Allow.

Step 1 of 7

Open a spreadsheet.

Google Sheets is a spreadsheet that lives in a browser tab. Go to sheets.google.com and click the blank one. That makes you a new file.

It saves itself as you type, so there is no Save button to hunt for. Give it a name in the top left if you want to find it again later.

What you are looking at is a grid of boxes. Each box is a cell, and every cell has an address. That address is the one piece of spreadsheet vocabulary Sortia will ask you for, and step 4 is nothing but that.

Step 2 of 7

Add Sortia to it.

Sortia is an add-on. It installs into Google Sheets rather than onto your computer, and it turns up inside the spreadsheet you already have open.

Click Install free below. That opens the Google Workspace Marketplace, which is Google's own catalog of add-ons, and you install from there with the account you are already signed in to.

Google then asks you to allow two things, and two is all Sortia ever asks for.

View and manage spreadsheets that this application is installed in. Sortia reads the cells you point a tool at and writes the results back. It cannot see any other file in your Drive.
Display sidebars and dialogs. Sortia shows its own panel.

Your spreadsheet data never leaves your sheet. The privacy policy lists both permissions in a table if you want the long version, and what an add-on can see explains how to read that screen for any add-on, not only this one.

Install free Read the privacy policy

Then find your way around.

Where the panel lives, and the one word it will ask you for.

Step 3 of 7

Open the panel.

There are two ways in, and either one opens the same thing. Use whichever you find first.

The side panel. Down the right-hand edge of the spreadsheet there is a narrow strip of small icons, one per app. The Sortia logo is in that strip. Click it.

If you cannot see that strip at all, it is collapsed: click the small arrow at the bottom-right corner of the window to open it, and the icons appear.

The Extensions menu. In the menu bar along the top, click Extensions, then Sortia, then Open Sortia.

Either way, a panel opens down the right-hand side. That panel is Sortia. It stays there while you work, and the spreadsheet carries on normally underneath it.

From the top, the panel holds a box that asks What do you need to do?, a large button that says Start from a template, two smaller buttons, and then the six tools, grouped by the kind of question they answer.

Sortia in neither place yet? Reload the spreadsheet tab once. A newly installed add-on sometimes needs the page refreshed before Google shows it.

Step 4 of 7

What a cell reference is.

Sortia sometimes asks which cells to use, and it wants an address rather than a description. The addresses work like a street grid.

Columns across the top are lettered. Rows down the side are numbered. A cell's address is its column letter and then its row number, so the box where column B meets row 2 is called B2.

A run of cells is written with a colon. C2:C6 means every cell from C2 down to C6, five of them. That is what a tool means when it asks for a range.

B2 is one cell. C2:C6 is the run of five under it.

You will rarely have to type one. Click a cell and its address appears in the box above the grid on the left, and if you drag across several cells Sortia picks the range up on its own.

Now the part you came for.

Load a model that already works, change its numbers to yours, and read what comes back.

Step 5 of 7

Load a model that already works.

You do not start from an empty sheet. Click Start from a template at the top of the panel. A window opens holding 379 ready-made models, and you can search it in plain words: rent, hiring, apartment, cash, order.

Pick one, read what it does, and click Load this template. Three things then happen at once.

A new tab appears along the bottom of your spreadsheet, holding the model.
You are moved to that tab.
The right tool opens in the panel with the cells already filled in for you.

Every model arrives with real numbers in it and runs as it stands, so you can press the button first and understand it second. That is the intended order.

194 of the 379 models run start to finish on the free tools. The rest use one of the five paid engines, and every free install includes five full-quality runs of those, on your own numbers.

Step 6 of 7

Change the numbers to yours.

Down the right of the model there is a block headed HOW TO USE THIS, and under it a Color KEY. The key names every kind of cell on that sheet, and it uses weight and style as well as color, so it still reads if color is hard for you to tell apart.

Input (bold): a figure or a name you fill in.
Calculated (plain): a formula, leave it alone.
Distribution (italic): an uncertain input Sortia varies.
Structure (bone): what each row and column is.
Output (dark): the result you read.

Type over the cells the key marks as input. Leave the calculated ones alone: those hold formulas, and typing over a formula deletes it.

Most labels on the sheet carry a note. Hover one and it tells you what that row is, and where the cell works something out, how.

Nothing you do here breaks anything permanently. If a model gets away from you, load it again from the library and it is written out fresh.

Step 7 of 7

Run it, and read what comes back.

Press the button at the bottom of the panel. It says Run analysis, or Run simulation, or Solve tree, depending on the tool. Results land on a new tab of their own, beside the model.

To the right of the numbers on that tab there is a written panel: what the tool did, then what this particular result says, then a short HOW TO READ IT list, then the color key again. Sentences, not notation.

The panel down the side of your screen carries the same thing, under a heading that reads What this means.

You can read that sentence and stop there. Every figure in it came from the run you just did, and it is reproducible: same data, same seed, same answer.

If something looks wrong.

The things that catch people out, and what each one actually is.

Sortia is not in the Extensions menu. Reload the spreadsheet tab once. A newly installed add-on often needs the page refreshed first.
Nothing in the panel works, and it is not your fault. If you are signed in to more than one Google account in the same browser, Google refuses everything an add-on tries to do. A school account and a personal Gmail together is the usual way this happens. Open a private or incognito window and sign in with just one account, or sign out of all of them at google.com and sign back in with only the one you want to use. Blocking third-party cookies does the same thing, so if you have turned those off, allow them for Google Sheets.
You can open the spreadsheet but Sortia cannot read or change it. The panel opens and every run stops with a message about permission. The sheet was shared with you view-only, which is the usual shape when a whole class opens a teacher's file, or the share was taken back, or your organization's policy blocks add-ons on it. Sortia cannot fix this from its side. Go to File, then Make a copy, and run Sortia on your copy; that works whichever of the three it is. Or ask the owner for edit access. Nothing about your Google account needs to change for this one.
You made a copy of a file, or renamed a tab, and the panel says the tab is gone. Close the panel and open it again from Extensions, click the tab your model is on, and run again. Since build 2026-09-27 Sortia looks the tab up by its name before it says this, so a copied file keeps working; if you still see it, the tab really has been renamed or deleted, and the message names the tab it was looking for.
The panel is blank, or stuck. Close it and open it again from Extensions. Nothing on your sheet is lost when you do that. If reopening changes nothing at all, read the account point above first.
A tool says it cannot find your data. It is asking for a cell range. Select the cells on the sheet first, then point the tool at them.
A tool says a cell holds text and it needs numbers. It has found something in your range that is not a number, and it names the cell so you can go and look. Usually it is the heading at the top of the column, and the fix is to tick Labels in first row so Sortia knows to skip it. If it is further down it is often a blank-looking cell, an N/A, or a number that was pasted in as text. Delete it, or select a smaller range that leaves it out. A column of numbers with several of these is read around them, and the report names every cell it skipped. A grid or a table stops at the first one and says there may be more, so you may fix one and see the message again pointing at the next; the second message says it is the second and names the new cell.
You typed over a formula. Undo it with Ctrl and Z, or Cmd and Z. Or load the model again from the library and start that sheet over.
Sortia says it was not given permission to read spreadsheets. The install was accepted without the spreadsheet permission, which can happen when the consent screen is closed early. Open Sortia again from Extensions and accept the permissions it asks for, or remove it from the Marketplace and install it again. It asks once.
A banner says Sortia was updated, or the panel says it lost the connection to Google. A new version went live while your panel was open, or the sheet sat idle long enough for Google to drop the link. Finish what you are typing, close the panel and open it again from Extensions. Nothing on your sheet is lost.
The run stops with a timeout, or says the sheet engine ran out of time. Google gives an add-on a fixed number of seconds per run, and a big model on the sheet engine can use it up. Cut the trials, simulate a smaller block of the model, or move the arithmetic into Sortia's own engine where the panel offers it. The message says which of these applies.
A cell in your model shows #VALUE!, #DIV/0!, #REF! or #N/A. Sortia refuses to run a model whose formulas are already broken, and names the cell. Fix that cell first; the usual causes are a deleted row it pointed at or text where a number was expected.
The report is too big to write, or a run was rolled back. Sortia writes a result all at once and undoes it if any part fails, so a sheet is never left half-written. Ask for a shorter report, fewer output cells, or a summary instead, as the message offers.
Sortia says you have used your free runs. The five Pro runs every account gets are counted per Google account, not per file. The free tools keep working. A licence key unlocks the rest; the card says where to get one.
Something else. Email support@sortia.io and say what you were doing and which tool you were in. A screenshot helps more than anything.

Where to go next.

Know someone who would use this? There is a message you can send them.