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6 Ways to Make Your Checkboxes Better

About this Tutorial

Learn How to Take Your Google Sheets Checkbox to the Next Level and Get More Organized! Click Now to Discover Creative Ways to Use Checkboxes and Boost Your Productivity!

We're going to take a basic function of Google sheets, which is the checkbox, and we are going to take it to its nth degree.

Video Transcript

00:00 Hello welcome. So we're going to take a basic function of Google sheets, which is the checkbox, and we are going to take it to its nth degree.

00:09 We're going to bastardize it. We are going to go crazy. Get a little creative with checkboxes today. Um, and I'm starting with a brand new sheet.new I've gone here.

00:20 I've added a brand new sheet and we are starting from scratch. So typically what I'm going to do is I'm going to show you what happens typically, and then we're just going to keep going.

00:30 So what you use Google sheets for a lot of times, it's probably like a to-do list. I have another video called an interactive to do lists and I've taken a checkbox and an it function and showing you how to, uh, basically show what's done.

00:44 This is not that video. This is just going to talk about check boxes. So what we usually do is, you know, we might have a task, right?

00:51 Let's talk about the to-do list to do right. We have a task and we have tasks, and then we might even have like, who does them?

00:59 Right? Who is assigned to them? If you have multiple people and you have task one, you have task two and you want to know like, did this person actually do it?

01:08 Well, you're probably going to insert, go to insert a checkbox, probably going to do that. You might even copy and paste this all the way down and great.

01:18 You have task one task, two task, three task, four. Great. Let's keep going. Right. Let's just keep adding more and more.

01:28 Um, and visually, you know, what happens is I always like to have a little bit of room, uh, above and beyond, uh, below these things.

01:38 So they don't all blur together. I like to also take the checkbox box and usually the check box is so tiny in this sort of very wide angle.

01:49 I will create a square. So I will do something like this. I will go to resize column. I will probably.

01:56 Okay. That's a hundred pixels. Um, I'm going to just cut it in half 50. Uh, we might even go smaller.

02:03 Let's that's perfect. So still instructing color. So what I might do as well is I will take these rows on resize, these rows as well, do it this way.

02:17 Me go over here. All right, perfect right. Click resize rows. And I want this checkbox to be a square. So I will specify that it's 50.

02:30 Um, and we get a lot of nice room. We get our checkbox in the middle of a square, a little bit of room so we can check, check it on, check it off.

02:43 Um, couple weird things. You can do a check boxes as well. Uh, this one is you can make this a hundred side a hundred.

02:54 Now what happens? Right? It checks. And the whole box is a checkbox, but you don't see the checkbox. Sometimes you don't need to see the checkbox.

03:03 So what you can do is you can take the color blue and put this blue. And if you click here, it'll say you have clicked on a trip class.

03:16 That's not visible. Why is that? It's because both the text color and the fill color exactly the same. So you don't want this, right?

03:27 You don't, you don't want it to necessarily not know if it's checked or not, but like maybe sometimes we just want to check it and move on with our lives.

03:37 So what you could do is you can create a custom color. Let's use this customer color As the text and use a custom color as the fill.

03:49 And we're going to make it just a little bit different. So we're just going to like move these numbers up or down.

03:54 It doesn't matter. It is so slight. And now you don't get that message and you get a check box. And if you look here, it's actually is changing true or false.

04:04 Do you see it a little bit? Um, but that's a really fun thing. You can also make it 200 here.

04:14 Oh, that's way too much. You can make your check boxes big as you want to fill up the entire thing.

04:21 Even though it's only 15, even though the Square's only 50 pixels by 50 pixels and the font size is 200 and that's a pretty cool thing to do.

04:29 And we can take that all the way down. Right? And now these are buttons, essentially not just check boxes. Um, what makes it a little interesting, some interesting things there many times with checkbox as though we check box is only true or false, and it's only a visual representation of true or false, you can actually change that true or false, by the way you can insert, this is probably a little off topic, but you can insert a check box.

04:56 You can right click on that check box. You can go to data validation and see here. It says criteria checkbox, right under it says, use custom cell values.

05:06 And you're going to just change this to yes, no, and save. And now whenever this check, see, it says, no we're already checked it's yes.

05:18 Great. So we can use this all the way down. All right. A little pet peeve of mine. I'm going to delete all the, uh, rows underneath here, just so we don't keep doing that.

05:29 Delete froze. All right. So now you see, actually it's not even a check, but I think I placed values here.

05:40 All right. We've got check boxes. So we have yes or no here. Maybe you need steps in a process, right?

05:48 Or check box only. Yes or no. True or false it's one or the other. It's a, it's a, uh, a binary function.

05:57 Uh, but what happens if we need to say like steps in a process approvals, we just need to say approved or not approved.

06:05 And what's going to happen is many times, uh, we'll do we'll either add a checkbox and say approved, right? But then this will still say true or false.

06:14 So we can actually change this. Uh, again, we'll, we'll do this again. We'll go to view more cell functions, data validation, and we go approved, not approved, but again, that's a binary from your, maybe there's like three or four things we need to choose from.

06:34 Right. We need to say, well, we checked it. We haven't approved it yet, but we checked in or, Hey, I've assigned this to someone else and they haven't checked it nor have they approved it.

06:45 So what's going to happen is we really will have like a C uh, or a few more options. And we're going to like say approved here, assign, uh, and then maybe the first step is check and there's also, you know, verify, right.

07:08 Th there might be multiple steps. So I'm going to actually insert a check box again, insert check box. I'm going to copy that all the way down.

07:18 We just want you to false here. We don't want anything else. We don't want to bastardize, but again, just like we did here with approved, we can make these all assigned unassigned, not checked yet, checked, verified, not verified yet.

07:32 Um, but now that we have like a sea of check boxes, like this is pretty hard, uh, to see, like to sift through, right?

07:45 We have black and white text. We have check boxes that are essentially sort of grayish a little bit. It is a nice visual representation.

07:56 Um, another option beyond check boxes is to do this is what people mainly do. Actually. I seen this a lot to do a drop down and they'll say less from approved.

08:11 And we'll say, um, actually, no, we want this from items approved. Not yet approved. Let me go say, so what's interesting about this is that there are actually three states there is unfilled out and then you can click the down and you can say approved.

08:30 And so a blink in this case is I haven't even done anything yet. I haven't even begun to do it yet.

08:39 Right. So that's pretty good. Sometimes check boxes are good for true or false, but you might not know of, like, I haven't done it yet because unchecked means nothing, right?

08:51 Like it doesn't mean that I've looked at this and tried it, but having a blank, a dropdown menu with two options, the blank means something.

09:01 It means I haven't done it yet. So it can also say unapproved, right? We can say approved or not. Not, yes.

09:09 This should not be not yet approved. It should be unapproved. Great. So we got approved. And so the blank actually is the representation of not get approved.

09:24 There we go. We have a problem there. Boom. So get, what you might want to do is have some things, check box, some things, a dropdown menu, where you have three states and you don't necessarily have to use texts for dropdown menus.

09:45 Um, you could do, I have a whole nother video about adding a ratings here where maybe you do like five, but then somebody else adds in five, five stars.

09:58 Like you want a rating and you want to know, you know, okay, it's one through five stars. So here I'll show you a couple of cool ways to do this, right?

10:06 We can do view more selections, data validation, and inside of this list of items, you can do this. We can do one star, a star.

10:17 There we go, where there's a star. And then we can do star comma, two stars, comma, three stars come up four stars, and then five stars.

10:26 If we want five stars as the highest you save, and now five star would be five stars. So again, in the other video, I talk about how we can convert this to an actual number, which we can use if we can use, if we can use case goal, we'll watch that other video.

10:46 If you want to know how to turn emojis and the numbers, um, can do this, but what, what's one more interesting thing we can do here, right?

10:55 If we use, we have three stars, this is pretty not, it's not shipper easy to tell the difference, right? W when we're using Google sheets, a lot of the time, like in the same Google sheet, a lot of the information is going to blur together.

11:11 If it looks all the same, if we have just this blank spot for two of these stars. So one extra little thing we can do, and we're going to just, I'm going to just show you here in data.

11:22 Validation is add more stars or boxes can do, uh, let's see if there's a black star, there are black stars.

11:33 Yay. Okay. So we can add four there, three there, which is adding two there. And one that let's see if this was save.

11:45 Now, when we want three stars, it looks like that. But again, this maybe look, this is pretty confusing. It's just, it's Blackstar with yellow star.

11:54 All right. We can do one better. Even better than this. We can just do a box. So was going to do before.

11:59 Here we go. You can, do you want to actually, black box? I think black square. I think it's called. Yeah.

12:07 Uh, can do a small or a big one. I think the small one. No, we want the big one black square.

12:16 I think it's called there. We want that biggest one possible. Yeah. That's good. That's going to look like a blank for those three of those.

12:27 And then to here to there, then that was what called safe. Now let's look at that. There is no mistaking that right.

12:40 That is one star and a bunch of boxes. We can also change the font size. I would love, I always like reading to be pretty darn big.

12:49 Let's go with 20. Oh yeah, that looks great. All right. Let's pace that formatting. Oh my God. That looks awesome.

13:01 Oh, that, that is really, really cool. So we can just take this. Oops. And we can even just delete all those if you don't want to read it yet, but this is great.

13:22 We can see very clearly the difference between five stars and one star, much easier than seeing blinks, especially on this flight background.

13:30 All right. Let's go back to these check boxes and try to make them a little bit better than a sea of black and white.

13:37 First off we can change the color. That's always cool. We can change the color of the green and we have nice green ones.

13:47 We can also change the background. I like to do the background too, a little bit darker there, and let's even lighten up that green a little bit more.

13:57 It's still green, but nice can do the opposite. So sometimes we want a light background and a darker checkbox. Let's see.

14:11 That's good. Oh, that's sweet. That looks so sweet. Right? Very different. But sometimes you want different and we can also, uh, copy and paste these.

14:23 I'm going to just insert two more rows, two more columns, and you can see what they look like with this, uh, sort of alternate style.

14:33 And that's what I like to do when I have sort of a see of the same thing over and over again, I can, we can also change the size cause maybe a one of these is more important than the other one, or we want to look at bigger size.

14:46 That is great. That makes it a huge difference. All right. Just to review, we've done a lot of cool things with check boxes.

14:57 What we have done is we have made a check box bigger than the cell. It isn't so that we sort of actually hide that it's a checkbox could even become a button.

15:07 We have created a sea of check boxes. If there's many multiple true or false things, we've also changed the true or false to a different different text.

15:17 Then, uh, we've added dropdown menus, uh, which dropdown menus are great for certain things that checkbox is don't do well.

15:25 And we even created a rating. Again, I have another video where I go deeper into rating. If you like this video, if you've gotten anything out of it, even the first one, I think the first one, knowing that you can make a check box bigger than the cell is like mind blowing and common, dumb below how you're using check boxes or ha heck just give me a thumbs up.

15:44 Give me a like on this video. Um, if it's, if you're watching it on YouTube and, uh, help you have a better goop sheet after this.

15:52 Thanks so much for watching. Bye.