Google Sheets stores formatting separately from information.

Format is the pre-defined technical structure in which bits are stored in software. For example, typically, we use human-readable formats like Google Sheets, MS Excel, PDFs, Google Docs, Websites, etc.

However, these file formats are human-readable formats and aren’t always ideal for use by machines.

• Formatting makes data readable by humans.
• Data for Humans = Data For Machines + Formatting

In Google Sheets, you can do formatting here:

When doing data analysis, you want to strip away the formatting and use machine-readable formats like CSV, XML, JSON, etc.

Machine readable formats follow some form of pattern that algorithms can read quickly. For example, pipe-separated value (PSV) files split columns by | and each row is identified by new line character \n. CSVs separate columns by comma, SSVs separate columns by semicolon, etc.