Everything I know about Checkboxes (Cool Hacks)

Beginner

About this Tutorial

Let me tell about some cool hacks you can do with checkboxes. Like making a checkbox have alternative values, or making a checkbox look like a button, not a check mark.

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Video Transcript

<div>0:01 Here's everything I know about checkboxes. We're gonna get really advanced and do things with checkboxes I don't think you've ever done before. 0:09 So, a checkbox looks like this, and how you get it is you go up to insert, checkbox , and you get a regular checkbox . 0:16 I think you already know, or you may know already, that you can change the text color . If you change the text color to something like white, and you change the background to something like, let's say, dark green, cool. 0:27 All well and good. You may know that already. Let's undo that for now.

But what you might not know is that you can right click and go down to view more cell actions, go to data validation . 0:39 Over here on the right we're going to select checkbox . It is already a data validation rule. And what a checkbox really is, is a representation of data . 0:48 True or false. But you can actually change that. If you check this box called use custom cell values , you can change true or false. 0:56 You can see here checked is true and unchecked is false.

You can change this to checked equals one, unchecked is equal to zero. 1:06 And if you, if we go back over to the formula bar , you can see now that it's zero, and if I check it, it's one. 1:13 So you can do counts with this very easily. You can also change this to any other thing, like uproot, any other. 1:20 Text approved or unapproved. And now if we go over to our, if we go over to our formula bar here, it says unapproved, and if we check it, it says approved. 1:31 That's really cool, right? There's some more advanced options here.

You can show help text if you want to literally say show help or on, show help approved or unapproved. 1:43 It'll say that. You can also reject the input, so in case somebody's copying and pasting something else, you can reject anything that is neither approved or approved or unapproved or whatever your true or false is. 1:55 True, false here. But there's more. There's actually more you can do with checkboxes and I'm going to show you sort of the most advanced thing I know of. 2:06 Here actually change it to all caps true. True and false. This is not even true or false.

It's all caps true or false. 2:11 Okay. You can change the text size of the checkbox and you probably might have done something like this where you want it to sort of a bigger checkbox . 2:24 But you can actually make it larger than the box itself. So if I enter something like 200 in here now, I'm going to actually move this box smaller. 2:36 And I don't know if you can tell but there is a check there, but it is 200. It's very big. 2:43 I'm going to make this a little bit nicer. I'm going to resize the row to 20.

And I'm going to resize the column to 20 as well. 2:53 Now, now it looks like sort of a slice. Right? Like a half and half. And it's the two different colors that are the text and the background. 3:02 So the background is here and the text is here. And we're still clicking the box. We're able to click the box just like a check box. 3:10 But we're getting this slash. We may not want to see this slash. We might not even want to see this check box, check at all. 3:18 We might just want to click the button and be done with it.

So what you might think to do is make the text the same color as the background. 3:28 So I move them both to all black. And now, we get this error . And it says heads up, you may have clicked on a check box that's not visible. 3:36 Toggle anyway. Okay. And you're like okay, maybe that only shows up once. Nope, it shows up every single time you're clicking it. 3:43 So how do you. Get rid of that message? Is that you change the text font color, or the text color and the fill color to slightly different colors. 3:55 So right now, it is 0 0 0 0.

And there is this other color we can just do 1 1 1 1 1. 4:03 Click OK. And now it is barely noticeable that there is a line there. You can sort of see it if you have really good vision. 4:13 So what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna change it even to less different. I'm gonna change it to 0 0 0 0 1 1. 4:21 So this is actually much less different than 1 1 1 1 1 versus 0 0 0. Click OK. And now you should not be able to see that there's any change. 4:31 But, do you see this change? True and false, this true and false are changing up here.

So this checkbox , just like a checkbox normally does, looks like a checkbox . 4:41 But this button here is actually changing when I click it, but you're not seeing it. This is really good if you want something in your sheet that is an interactive button, but like something else is happening. 4:55 You don't want the checkbox to go check on and off, you just want the button to be pressed, meaning you want some change. 5:04 True, false, change, actually triggers any onedit function .

So if you're using Apps Script in your, in your sheet, and you're programming some kind of like onedit function where something, maybe a timestamp shows up, maybe it's a timer that starts and stops, you can use this checkbox as a button where 5:22 you don't necessarily see that it's a checkbox and you don't see it go on and off, but you do actually get the on and off, you get the true or false, you get the action taking place that's an edit of a value ah by one click. 5:35 I think that's really cool.

And I've used this many times, I've used this in track anything, so if you're looking for a way to see this implemented I'll show you. 5:44 So this is a free Google Sheet that I have available, it's called track anything in a Google Sheet and the A1 box just like we did here, here is a checkbox but it's just larger than the cell and what it does is it just tracks single actions you're taking and if you click the box, A1, within a 24 hour 6:05 period, within a day, it will show up as a day.

A done, so this tracks daily habits, maybe even tracks like medication that you're taking and you're like, hey did I take my medication today or within the last 24 hours? 6:18 Can I check? Yes, I can check. Okay, yes, I did take it yesterday or I did not take it within the last 24 hours. 6:24 This is really, really helpful because I don't want a checkbox that is going on and off.

I just want somewhere, some area, space where a user clicks and then you do see the action taking place which is the filling in of the next day. 6:40 This is one through 52, this like tracks a whole year, great for habit tracking, great for nutrition tracking, fitness tracking, anything like that. 6:51 And so, this box is really, really helpful because the action, the, the, the, the, trigger is this on edit, but the effect is somewhere else. 7:01 We don't want the user to see this going on and off.

We just want to see, okay, we've tracked it, done. 7:06 So, check out, track anything, you can get it for free, put in zero dollars for the name and fair price. 7:11 It is absolutely free for any one watching this video. If you're a member of Fettersheets or not, go check it out. 7:17 Thanks for watching. And I hope, and I hope this was really helpful to show you some really cool things about checkboxes. 7:23 This has literally been everything I know about checkboxes.</div>