The Excel spreadsheet is a brilliant tool for creating, viewing, editing, and sharing data, charts, and files. However, it is often deemed boring and unappealing in terms of its formatting. In his tutorial, Childress (2018) offers a few tricks that could help make any spreadsheet more eye-pleasing, the Proximity Bus Complete spreadsheet included. While it does not contain complex data that the user could not understand after studying the spreadsheet for a minute, good formatting is to help one quickly find meaning without scrutinizing each cell. When formatted, the Proximity Bus Complete spreadsheet will draw the user’s attention to the cells providing the most important information and will be easier to examine.
One of the most simplistic yet effective formatting tips is font effects: bold, italic, and underline. These are present in almost every application featuring text editing and can be used in a spreadsheet to draw attention to particular cells or distinguish some of them from others. Another effect to apply to a spreadsheet is shading – also referred to as fill – which is used to give prominence to key data as well. Shading changes the color of a cell’s background from white to any other; however, it is preferable to use light shades so that text remains readable. One more tip is to change alignment, which refers to how a cell’s data is aligned concerning its edges. The default option is left alignment but one can choose for it to be center or right to improve the readability of a spreadsheet’s content.
I feel like these three tips are the most important ones because they can completely change the way a spreadsheet looks in terms of data comprehensibility and, therefore, optimize its functionality. However, to apply these tips, one does not need to be an advanced user or put in the extra effort: it only takes a couple of clicks to get results. The formatted Proximity Bus Complete spreadsheet shows how big a difference these simple tools can make.
Reference
Childress, A. (2018). How to format your Excel spreadsheets (complete guide). Envato Tuts+. Web.