Hi. So this is a really interesting one for the designers at heart. For anyone who is trying to do something a little extra in their dashboards in particularly, or trying to display some type of data in a visually interesting way just to add that little pizzazz. Here, I'm gonna, I'm gonna, I'm gonna show you how to add drop shadows and you'll then be able to drop shadows into your designs of your sheets in a lot of different ways.

But it takes a little bit of engineering and it takes a little forethought because you have to set up your rows and your cells and. Columns and rows and cells. Very in per, very specifically. So in this case I have I've gone a little overboard, made a really colorful to show you a nice muted red and blue with a little bit of a darker blue with a chop shadow here.

You can also go the other. The other way and do go me neon and go a very offset kind of thing. And you can change these colors, to all sorts of things. Remember I said, who would be crazy enough to use that kind of color, that blue? I said that in another video about using that blue for inputs.

But you can go a little crazy here. With your neons as much as you want, and you can make these pretty darn cool looking offset types of things. And I'm gonna show share with you in this video how to do that, the math involved in that. It's a little bit again you just gotta have a little more forethought into doing this and know you want to do this.

Here's a few ways. That you can see. You don't have to have such a thick drop shadow. You can do different kinds. You can actually do different angles. I'll show you over here. You can do all sorts of angles. You can do more muted colors. This is more of a dignified, beige ish. This is the math.

What do you need to know? The basic idea is that the drop shadow is caused by the by it seeming like this is one cell here and the drop shadow takes up the difference between the top of the cell and the drop top of the drop shadow. This a. Is equal to the bottom of the cell and the bottom of the drop shadow.

What we really have are three rows, three columns and three rows, and then we either merge or use the we, I've merged a lot of times these four cells here and these four cells. As long as this, these two columns are the same width and these two rows are the same height. Then when. Color in or use this as a single cell, and then color in the bottom two right cells and the bottom middle cell.

This becomes a drop shadow here and it can be any size and you can change the size based on just changing the width of the these two column. And the height of these two rows. I'll show you that in just a hot second. We'll go back over here, I think, and you can see this has a very tiny one because we've literally, here, I'll actually do it on this one.

So if I take. F and I'm going to use the command key to select both of these. I'm gonna right click, I'm going to resize select columns in here. You can choose your size, so I'm gonna use 10. Okay. And then I'm gonna choose this tiny little, let's find it. Six. And then also pressing command and getting three.

Clicking resize row. What was that? 10? And now? That's a nice drop shadow there. Even that you can offset it down this one down more than it is wide. You don't have to do exactly 45 degrees an degree angle. This one is a little weird because, so what you need to know is that it is based on these columns and these rows, so you can't really do two separate drop shadows.

Like sizes, unless they are truly like a different column and a different road than these. So that's why if we go back through these, you can see they're all the same angle. These are all the same angle and these are not, and they look pretty messy. You can also add a border around your cells that you're trying to.

This adds a little bit of an interesting offset, a little eye-catching white around it. Here we have some primary colors. You don't have to color everything the same. It, I would recommend coloring everything the same. If you don't, it just is a little disorienting. You can also do it on white.

This is actually pretty cool. I think this looks pretty nice. And then as I said, you can have different angles and I'll show you that in one second. Let's go here. So basically to get different angles, you're just gonna color in the bottom right to get that, and then the top let's do a darker green.

You're gonna do something like this, and now that has the angle going up into the left can do the other way too to the right if you just. White here and then white here. And actually we need to color in that. So now it's offset up and to the right. And so we just need to move the white over. We want to do down to the right.

Oh, we're gonna do these two.

And so now that's down into the, now down to the left. You need to color in these three. Put the white corners here. And there we go. So now we're doing, the shadow is down to the left. What's interesting too is I've shown you on other videos how to change the width of the cell. Columns and the height of the rows in different ways.

Typically, your, you're thinking probably most of the time are gonna be doing this, but it really truly helps to choose command, choose both of these, and then resize these at a very particular size that really helps this drop shadow kind of thing happen. It just makes it a lot easier to create this if we are doing it this way.

There between have a nice little drop, shadow 2020. Any other questions? Please feel free to ask me, but hopefully this is a really interesting way you have to use three columns, three rows in order to make drop shadows. Yes. And I don't think I mentioned it, but it is really helpful to make.

Why it's helpful to do these row and columns the same size, to do them manual manually, like typing them in is so that they're the same size, so that you can get a nice looking version of this. It gets very messy very quickly if you're trying to do this by hand and you got like a tiny little one on the right and then a big one on the.

Those look a little messy, whereas the even ones where the, this d column, and actually we can go back to this math. This b and a are exactly the same. It, it looks a lot better. So it can change these to, let's say 30. Actually let's go more. 50, and these are both 50. That just, it ends up looking a lot cleaner that way for some reason.

Maybe because these are squares. I don't know. But to change the colors and why I also say this takes a little bit of forethought and stuff is because it takes a while to change these colors. So let's go over here. I'll show you this. Nope, I'll show you this one. Let's d. And this is what it takes to color in if I want to change the background changing how to change.

So if I wanna change the background of this, here's what I have to do. I have to select my color, let's say purple. I'm gonna command y just to make sure that I get that the same color. I can select these columns and sort of these row. But now I have these corners that I still have the color, and I can only color them in very manually.

So it does take a little bit of time if you're trying to choose between your colors and you're trying different things it just takes a few moments. I don't think that took too much time. In order to change these colors, you just need to do something like this. Let's do a burnt orange down here.

Let's do that. You have to be very particular and get them, get exactly those cells you want. And also that's also one good reason to have a large drop shadow instead of a tiny one. So you can change the color fairly quickly instead of having to like line up your arrow. Exactly. Again, I can go through that again if you want.

Maybe a darker gray. Again, not too badly. It's not gonna be huge times suck, and it really does bring an entirely new element to your sheets. Especially dashboards, which can get pretty old and pretty stale. Also, these darn downright look great when they're printed if we do file download as a pdf.

Looks really cool. Printed as well. So hopefully enjoyed learning how to make a drop shadow. Again, I will keep this math if you have access to the sheet. If you're a member, probably a member, if you're watching this you have access to the sheet and you can make a copy and check out the math and see this sort of diagram if you'd like.

Thanks so much for watching.