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Merge Cells for Dashboards

About this Tutorial

to make better Dashboards consider merging cells.

Video Transcript

 So in another video we went over how to create these squares, and we're gonna play around with them a little bit more right now, and we're gonna merge cells to the left of these so that these items could all be placed together. So what. Is a very normal situation with items or dashboards is you want to connect or literally put juxtapose or adjacent, have information adjacent that fits together.

So in this version here we have a header at the top and then. We have our items, but they're separated by these gaps, which absolutely, it creates a beautiful per a beautiful scape landscape for your information. But especially if you're gonna use sort of similar colors or the same color throughout here, these items, I don't, the, the rose might not.

It might not help the, the viewer know that those items are connected, that those are all the same items. I know it sounds silly, but we want to do as much work as we can for the viewer to really just understand implicitly what this information is. And so really what you might wanna do is you might, might wanna combine or not combine, but juxtapose or keep these items adjacent, which helps the viewer understand, oh, these are all the same.

and very typically what we normally do is have a header at the top right. We have a header row, and that header row might actually look differently than the under un rows underneath. But let's make, let's just do one step further and I'm gonna show you a creative way to do this. We're gonna do this and we might want to, we'll do here, let's do it right here to the left.

and when you might see, okay, that's header, but we all want, we want one header there. What we will do is we will go up to here, merge cells, and it'll always get the value in the top left. We'll say, okay, and now that's all one, and now we can make that the same color as, as the items. But now you have, see this item is, is up top.

You know, sort of not nice cuz it's a big item with three little items. We can go back and do the same thing we did before. Let's do this resize a column, resize a row. We're gonna do 25 so that this row is 100 or this one is 100. And each of these are exactly one fourth. And then we can do the exact same thing over here.

We're gonna kill this. We're gonna. Here, and obviously we need to merge these cells. So we'll go here, merge. Boom. We'll do the same here. Actually, we don't even need to do this because I already can see that this is going to be very wide. So one thing you can do for dashboards is make it sort of bring things down to a second level.

Let's resize this column. It's gonna be 100, okay? And this column is 200, 200 and 100. We can even make this even wider. Maybe we have a lot of texts there, and that helps also keep that those items really nicely positioned. Give 'em not white space, but I guess red space there. You can kill this header.

right click, right size, resize, home . Let's expand that. Now what we're gonna do, I'm gonna move these down to here. I'm gonna give it a gap as well. Keep the header there. Take the items. I'm doing command X, which is cut, and then pace, which just moves it. I'm gonna move these, mark these, sorry, and then move this here.

Cut and paste this to here and then merge these. And this gives you like a really interesting way to, let's resize this to 10. . This gives you a really interesting way to create a dashboard with little items, and it's a different shape than a normal sort of header across the top and lists going down.

Now your header is to the left and we have items to the right. It might be, you know, subscriptions, subscribers, and you might actually even be able to do this. Let's insert left and we're gonna put an emoji. I'll be right back and I'll show you. . So what you could do is I picked an emoji for each of the platforms that you might have subscribers on.

You can you know, you can even insert images into these cells. If you want to use real icons. You just need to have PNG icons. But like, if you have YouTube subscribers Twitter followers, Instagram like taking a selfie or Facebook followers or fan page. This is a fun way to create a dashboard with different items here.

So hopefully this gave you a really cool idea. In order to merge cells you can create really interesting, visually appealing dashboards that go well beyond the normal rectangular cells in a Google sheet.

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