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Roast: Sales Tax Calculator

About this Tutorial

I would not think that I would enjoy sales tax calculators, no one enjoys sales tax calculators, but when it's in a Google sheet, it's really exciting.

Video Transcript

0:00 I would not think that I would enjoy sales tax calculators, no one enjoys sales tax calculators, but when it's in a Google sheet, it's really exciting.
0:10 Um, and this one has a lot of really fun things that I, I can recommend to you to check out, to, to change.
0:18 Um, one is you have instructions here on the right, so let's go through the sales tax calculator. Here's the actual sales tax calculator right here.
0:26 It's, uh, essentially six lines. We have make a copy of your common tax rates. Um, and we have an introduction and a key.
0:35 Okay, great. Um, instructions. I would absolutely put on a separate tab, um, because in this case in particular, um, your information is nicely compacted into one right here on your adding this like, I guess, invisible border, right?
0:53 Uh, no man's land or no Dana lab here. And then having instructions. Um, what I would do is I would put this on a separate tab and I would have a screenshots inside of that tab and said, okay, and make little, just take a screenshot and then draw on like Adobe premiere, not premiere preview, like at
1:14 a PDF reader, draw little lines that point like, step one, step two, step three, on these like screenshots and show it or make a little video.
1:23 Uh, loom videos are really simple to make. You can make free ones. luna.com is available for free. Um, for I think a hundred videos up to five minutes, if your instructions are less or more than five minutes, break it into parts, break it into sections.
1:38 Um, and say like, step one, do this and it should be 30 seconds. Step two, do this 30 seconds. Step three, do this 30 seconds.
1:46 And then, um, what I've really done in a lot of sheets where I have those kinds of loom videos is you can keep adding to that.
1:53 As questions come up as a frequently asked questions, you can keep adding to those instructions. Let me make a copy of this.
1:59 Cause I have two more, um, suggestions. And one of them is about this FileMaker copy link. So you file make a copy.
2:08 You have this button here and it copies it, right? So if I click that button, this is what shows up, uh, not, not a blank page, let it load a little bit.
2:17 It's um, it's Google's copy document page, which is super, uh, terrible. This is, this is a simple, like just make a copy page, but there is a really fun thing you can do.
2:33 And it takes two seconds up here in the URL. Um, at the end, let's go to the end of the URL instead of copy, what we can do is right.
2:43 We're going to delete copy template and then slash preview. And what this does, I'll show you is, takes your sheet and shows it, and then has a, um, co use template button over there, right there.
2:58 So this gives people a view into the sheet once they have access to it and they, and they want it, um, let them know what they're copying.
3:07 Um, this could also be like a security issue. Like if you, um, want to make sure people know what they're copying say like, bam, right here, this is much better experience than that copy, um, text experience.
3:22 So I would say change that link to that. Let's use this template. All right. So we made a copy. Um, and here I would just say, click here, make a mega copy click here.
3:38 Let's go there. Um, let's see what that URL is. So really this is like a really simple fix here. We're just going to go to this URL and again, just inter uh, delete, copy and put template preview.
4:02 No, um, but I would also put this, this, um, button, I would make a button, uh, in better seats. I talk about all the time making really cool looking buttons, design.
4:13 I'm not going to go into that now because it takes like a few more minutes than we have. Um, but I would put this on a separate tab.
4:25 All right. So now that we have the start here, sales tax calculator instructions, um, and we have the file, make a copy here.
4:33 Um, we can go and delete that from the other tab. All right. I discovered a secret and I will fix that secret.
4:45 So this, the three is a list of a range, but it's only inclusive and exclusive. So you have the data validation and it's a list of a reign, but we can just make that a list of items.
4:58 Um, I don't know, including inclusive efforts, bullying was of techs who is safe and that's the, that'll be the same thing there.
5:11 Now we can delete, uh, like this and everything's fine. Yeah. So I'll Nope, it's not okay. There is a little bit of an Easter egg here and it's really fun.
5:27 It's really cool. So if I change exclusive and inclusive, so now there's two items there to inclusive. Um, we get this.
5:36 So, um, I don't know what exactly happened. I didn't read the instructions properly, but, um, I think this is a cleaner look at least.
5:45 And, um, and it gives you the opportunity to do more. Which one last thing I would do is, um, the text Ariel is like the basic, the, the, the bare what you can do.
5:59 Um, if you want an interesting option, I would change the text to consult console us, console us from a salon.
6:10 Um, and this seems a little more calculator X, like this is sales tax calculator. I would add, I would make the text like that.
6:18 I would also change the size right now. I think it's default 10. It gets really difficult for users to see, um, numbers that small there's a certain population for which even 10, 11 or 12 font is hard to read on a computer screen.
6:38 Um, and you know, something like 25% of all Americans have some disability with. Um, and that includes like colorblindness. That includes, um, eyeglasses, like people with eyeglasses, like myself, have a hard time, tiny font on screens.
6:53 So you want to be a little more inclusive and try to increase the size of the text, especially when you have the room and opportunity to do so.
7:03 Um, I would suggest at least the 14, if not, um, if you can do more, do more like 16, especially if it's the simple few things that they can all fit within the viewport.
7:14 Um, there are different types of viewpoints. Like if, if someone's using this on mobile, you might want to look at that.
7:20 Um, and, and take a look as is the font size is wrong for mobile, and there might be a good fit down to like 14 or 15, but 16, I think for this is like a really good one.
7:30 Um, and then for headers, so I have, uh, a tough time thinking that this is good to have sales tax calculator here.
7:37 When you have a, the name of the whole sheet is sales tax calculator. Um, just one more text. It can make look really simple, simplify, minimize, um, the, what people see the key.
7:51 You can also put as, um, down more, or keep it in the viewport. If it looks nice, if this one looks nice, this is like one of the coolest ones I love that this input is in yellow, and this is in orange, red, really like that.
8:04 That's really cute. Um, and you can, you can keep going with that, you know, change up different thoughts. Um, I would say come forward, here is a good next step.
8:15 There are so many options here, but let's look at what can afford. It looks like comfort to come for clap.
8:22 I don't know how to pronounce that. Let's go with comfort. Yeah, I think that looks fine. Um, and maybe like a 15, there you go.
8:32 Um, and yeah, it doesn't necessarily look like Google shitty, but like why, why do we have to look like the default goose we don't have to, this is, this is better shit, baby.
8:42 All right. Thanks for watching. Bye.