5 Tricks to Make Your Spreadsheets Easier to Read & Understand

Submitted by schwarz on

spreadsheet towerWell-formatted text and cells can draw attention to specific parts of a spreadsheet, and make it more visually-appealing and easier to understand.

Five simple things can make your spreadsheets easier to read and understand; you can ...

  1. choose a better format for numbers by using "long dates" and converting decimals to percents
  2. use color to differentiate the header from the data
  3. change size, font, and style to make the important text stand out
  4. maximize readability by choosing an appropriate alignment
  5. add borders to define areas

Take 4 minutes to watch this video from GCFLearnFree — it shows how you can use all 5 tips to improve your next spreadsheet:

Source of the video: Goodwill Community Foundation: Excel 2010 > Formatting Cells, Part  2 of 6 > Formatting Text
Image credit:HikingArtist.com via photopin cc

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Comments

Formatting cells

Submitted by Judy Osier (not verified) on

It never occurred to me that a spreadsheet could be altered in so many different ways! Thanks so much for the great lesson. I'm going to watch it a few more times and take notes. I'm fairly new to Excel so I'm just kind of puttering along, but I do have several spreadsheets that I work with, so I'm going to give these tips a try.