Turn Bland Sheets Into Glam Sheets!

Beginner

About this Tutorial

A few tips to make your Google Sheets look better.

Sheet Resources

Access Sheet

Copy Sheet

Preview Sheet

Video Transcript

<div>00:00 So, you want your Google Sheets to look better.

One of the reasons you want them to look better is because you want to feel better inside of Google Sheets. 00:08 If you're using Google Sheets all day, every day, and you are staring at a black and white, blank, kind of aerial, uh, default view, uhm, your data 's gonna be scrunched up, mixed up, you're gonna get headaches and stuff. 00:22 So, I want to show you in this video a few of the things that I would do, very simply, in just a few minutes, uh, how to make your Google Sheets look better. 00:31 So, this Google Sheet, this is what a bland sheet looks like.

You have some information here. This is like courts and facilities, uh, in my local area. 00:40 And, I want to make this look better. Here's what I actually did, and this is what it looks like. Now, I'm gonna go through a bit of the individual items that I did, but just generally speaking, I put all the club names over here on the left. 00:56 I did give a little bit more space. And, I categorized them.

I categorized them by area and vibes, and each of these areas, even though they may be different names like Chingu and Carbocan, I've labeled them as the same color, if they're relatively similar. 01:12 Just because, uh, data management will say, okay, you probably want to, your first instinct is probably to say, okay, for every different thing we're going to have a different color. 01:23 But what the colors do is allows you to see groups of information that are relative to each other.

So, um, that's one interesting thing I did with these colors. 01:33 But I also put bold and changed the font, changed the font size. This is 10, but it's quicksand, but it's this is 12 court numbers, because if this was the same size as the text over here on the left, this single number would be very hard to read. 01:49 So I did increase it a little bit.

I also changed the font color up here in the header to be a little bit more aesthetic to the background and not to jump off the page because the header even though what we usually do when we create a header is we'll go up to the header and we'll just like highlight  02:07 it. Right? Something like that. But really the data that we want to get out of a sheet is down here, not the header . 02:14 We want the header to actually recess a little bit, go in the background a little bit.

So what we do is we make the font color the same color as the background, but a darker version of it. 02:24 And you can also do the reverse. You can make a lighter version of the background color if you want it to be uhm the other way around. 02:31 Maybe like a dark mode style. Okay, so I want to go through all of the steps, or all the things that I look at when I change a sheet in order to make it look better. 02:40 So if I'm looking at this and I'm like, where do I start? Here's a list.

So number one is I always try to change the font. 02:49 This is very important because it sets the tone for the entire sheet, but it also sets different tones. You want to have usually a different tone. 03:01 Style in your header . I recommend starting with something like Oswald because it is a thinner It's not as wide as other things. 03:10 So sometimes you may have a header where Here it says covered.

This is a wide word where really inside here is just yesterday But if you change this to Oswald, it will shorten it a little bit, make it a little bit tighter. 03:27 So, definitely change your font. Then font size. Again, I would change the header font to a little bit, font size a little bit less. 03:36 And increase the font of things that you want to stand out. Or at least, when they're in their similar sizes, they're not going to be relative. 03:45 So here, the number of quarts. It's hard to see this, even if you center it.

It's still a little hard to see if it's the same font size. 03:53 You can even make it huge. If whatever is the important information you want to see right at the center. glance or if it's a tiny thing like yes or no or quart number or single number . 04:07 Make it at least stand out and up with the longer words. Okay, font color. I love playing with font color. 04:15 I love playing with the font color so that it recesses in the back as I said earlier, the header .

But also, as you're going through the columns, some columns you may not want data to show up. 04:28 So like here is a question mark. I don't necessarily want that question mark to be the exact same font color as actual data . 04:35 The question mark means there's nothing there. But I still want to have something. So we used conditional formatting here and said if it's a question mark, just like make it a little lighter than the black text here. 04:49 Um links, we made blue and actually I made it a different blue.

I didn't like this like stand out blue and I wanted to make the website stand out more than the Instagram or more than these ah fonts. 05:01 data over here. So you can always change the font color to help you. You can also change the font size, like not size but the weight of it. 05:12 Bold, unbold kind of thing. Resize rows and resize columns. I do this fairly often. I will also usually select all of the rows and give it a little bit more space. 05:25 And I will also center it just to have a little bit more space between the rows.

Now columns are interesting. 05:33 We're going to do different things with different columns. We don't want to just have the same All I'm with everywhere because for instance this like status covering cafe. 05:45 These are one word things. We do want actually these to have all the same size because they're relatively similar data points. 05:54 But something like area and vibes that we want it to stand out more. So we're going to give it way more space. 06:02 Especially with this drop-down that's going to change colors which I'll show you in a minute. Background color .

Background color matters a lot especially with drop-downs. 06:12 See we can tell that there is different data here like this says Chengdu, this is preronym. But sometimes with these drop-downs we want similar categories to be the same color so that we can quickly visually analyze them. 06:27 So if we go to our edit button. Now I know these three areas are all fairly similar area. Preronym, Chengdu, and there's another one Umalis. 06:42 Where is it? Hard to read it. It's all the same right? Okay and green.

So I'm gonna hit done and I'm gonna apply to all and now see these are all different words but now I can see they're all relatively similar because they're in the same neighborhood even though they're different cities. 06:59 So maybe you want to like put the same color for all the states. If you're putting together a directory of different cities and put all the same state as the same color, up to you. 07:08 But this is a great way to visualize this sort of disparate information but see that it's all connected.

If we go over back here we can we want to change borders. 07:22 So I try to leave as few borders as possible. Borders meaning this particular button up here. Like this. On this page what I did is I used actually the background color of the row as the border. 07:41 So I do have a freeze here for the first two lines that adds a little bit of a border that I sort of don't necessarily like that much. 07:49 I can actually get rid of that. Clicking and dragging up here. I think this looks nicer.

But now we don't have any single like line borders. 07:58 We use the background color as the border. What I do all the time is go up to view, show, and uncheck this grid line. 08:06 So this is what grid lines would look like. And then this is what it looks like without grid lines. Usually without grid lines it's going to look cleaner. 08:14 And then I'll try to introduce some type of background color to create those borders. But if I have to, I will add borders. 08:24 Like these drop down menus, I actually don't necessarily like this pill uhm look either.

So actually I'm going to edit that right now into advanced options . 08:35 I'm going to just make it an arrow. Done. Apply to all. That I thought was going to look better, but because this limited is probably the same color, it looks weird. 08:48 And it looks much bigger. So for aesthetics, I'm going to actually undo that. That did not increase the nice betterness of that. 08:58 Uhm, but you can play around with that, right?

Play around with maybe just an arrow, or a pill, or even just uhm without the arrow could help. 09:12 So the next thing I would look at is changing the shade of the border color .

This is fairly easy to do, and it takes just a moment and some knowledge to know. 09:24 Just go up to borders, it changes to like much lower one, and what it'll do is it'll recess into the background without being the total grid lines. 09:37 Like this might look like the same grid lines as before, but it's only on where You can even do something here with like a border underneath there. 09:47 We can even add to the thickness, but decrease the color shade, and that might look nice as well.

At least it adds some aesthetic differences to your sheet. 10:00 And one thing I do always suggest is moving some data to a hidden tab. So fairly often people will add a header up here, have some explanation what it's about, but I put my about page over here on a different tab. 10:14 You can see it on paddleinparadise.com. I have all the about here.

I don't use up the space on this page for extra information. 10:28 And you may think it is super important information, especially how to use a sheet, what you need to like know in order to use a sheet, but one thing to keep in mind is that if you read that. 10:40 And you only have to read it once or twice, and never again, then I would suggest moving it to another tab. 10:47 This just keeps your data area very clean.

Keeps instructions away, keeps extra information on another tab, still in the same spreadsheet file, but somewhere else. 11:01 So yeah, I think reviewing through these, this is what I would do to make your Google Sheets look better.

Look at the font, change the font, change the font style, especially the header , change the font size, especially depending on the data that you're seeing and you want to see, change the font color 11:20 , and all also in this weight, maybe bold some things or keep some things unbold, resize rows to give yourself more room or padding, resize columns appropriately, so sometimes you'll want all the columns, some columns to be all the same, sometimes you want columns to be their maximum width. 11:38 One extra thing you can do here is if your headers are a little bit bigger than your text, you can actually align the, or sorry, rotate these, so rotate them up, and now we can keep this very small, but still read this header here. 11:58 So that's a little, cute little trick.

you can do. Background color , I use it all the time, I actually use the background color for borders, sometimes I'll just delete all of the borders, and delete all the grid rows, or at least not show all the grid rows, or if I do want some kind of gridding, and  12:14 I need some borders, I'll change the shade, and change the color to something else, other than just that.

That quick button black, you can also just a couple clicks change the shade and change the color, and I will always suggest moving some extra information from your page to another tab, especially 12:35 instructions on how to use it, who made it, what other information you need.

And the trick there is if you ever add information that you only need to read once, you probably want to put it on an about page. 12:47 Of course, it's always dependent on your needs and what you need and how you want to communicate your information to someone else. 12:54 And also how often people are going to use it.

If somebody needs to use it once, like the entire sheet once, then maybe put some more information here. 13:03 You might not have the amount of time you want to get them over to an about page or a summary page or some instructions page or how to use page. 13:11 Sometimes you want to label this how to use and I would understand that, but I would always suggest moving a lot of information to a how to use page or a start page. 13:20 Start here tab or an about tab, that kind of thing. Hope this helps turn your bland sheets awesome and make your Google sheets look better.</div>