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Communicate Better with Gridlines, Border Styles, and Border Colors - Google Sheets

About this Tutorial

Make your Google Sheets visually appealing and easier to understand with our expert tips on using gridlines, border styles, and colors. Learn how to create a professional-looking spreadsheet that effectively communicates your data to your audience. Boost your productivity today! We're gonna be talking about how to communicate better with grid lines, border styles, and border colors. Really interesting thing happens when you hide grid lines. You lose the grid, and I'll show you how to add that in. And some really interesting things you can do with different styles of border.

Video Transcript

 Hey, welcome. In this video we're gonna be talking about how to communicate better with grid lines, border styles, and border colors. Really interesting thing happens when you hide grid lines. You lose the grid, and I'll show you how to add that in. And some really interesting things you can do with different styles of border.

You can add meaning to different cells without being without being intru. It can help you communicate much better. And then also I'm gonna show you how to make better headers here on your sheets, on your tables, and we're gonna run into a challenge down there. And that'll help you fix first how to hide grid lines.

If you haven't head grid lines before, you just go to up to view, click grid lines, two clicks. That's all it takes. So we hit the grid lines. You can do this on an A sheet for any reason. But as you can. Right away the sheet gets a lot less busier. We can focus the eye on the things we wanna focus on.

And that's it. You can use different border styles. They're up here in the borders little window. And if you just click over here it's underneath this what is this? This. Color. So color is up at the top, and then the style is here. Now you can tell, you can do what normally people I've seen, most people do when they do borders, they do this normal thin border, and that's great.

But sometimes we wanna give different emphasis. Sometimes we want to mix different borders. You can actually do this really well. You can sort of do a header with, let's do this header with AIC border.  Let's do a gray, one thick border, and then we can use the dashed or dotted lines in the center.

So we want to use like a dotted in the center and then we wanna fill it or around it as well with a thinner one. . So as you can see, I got through a little bit of a challenge. It's whatever you select it holds. So want that in the center? Then we need to click away, and now we're going to use a thinner line for the outside.

And so this, you can make a nice table that looks a little more interesting where the inner lines are less intrusive. So normally this will look like, let's do here. You might just do a lazy kind of thin line everywhere.  and you see everything's the same. Whereas this, we can get a little bit of hierarchy and let the data, you know, inside do its work.

That shows up. That data shows up a lot better. When you have that nice, thin, almost dotted or dash lines, and you have a lot of, you have a normal one, you have a slightly thicker one. You have AIC one here. Which I like to use for like means and stuff. We'll get to color soon. Dashed is fun. If you want to sort of share with someone, you know, something that's incompleted dotted.

If you want to make it a little less inside of tables, I like to do like a little less bridge. Still wanna have that format and then double line if you wanna make so.  give something emphasis. You can even do like a dotted line. Yeah, let's do that. See what that looks like here. You can do even a darker color there in that maybe nice winner's gallery.

You can use that for different types of things. . What I also want to share with you is that you can color these and you can give meaning to those colors, you know, if you want to instead of, most of the time when we add color, we're gonna do it in a background. This fill color is gonna be very bright and intrusive.

And sometimes we wanna do that, but sometimes we wanna just give a little bit of information around sort of the words. We don't want to get in the way of the words. Sometimes this is unreadable, like if it's a. Red and a dark text will have to be doing something like this. And we don't really wanna do that all the time.

We want to sometimes have the texts all in black or even nice a little bit less, right? But we wanna make the text uniform, but we want to make different  give information, right? I like using this blue, this bright blue when I want someone to fill in information and I want them to fill out that, like, enter your number here.

There is almost no way to disregard this, right? But sometimes we wanna just help people along so we give them that info there. If we want to give them a warning, we don't really wanna say like, don't do this. We wanna say like, oh, this is an increased this is interesting. We can do that. Or we can do red and, and border that in red.

And it's like, danger. This is a problem. Don't do this. Watch out for this. But we don't want to do it where it's a fill color. We want it sort of maybe be a results, or maybe it's not results. Maybe this is not the end goal. We want them to continue on through a path. We can do that border color. And the last thing I'll say is one cool thing you can do with borders is when you merge the cells you can get all around and you don't necessarily have to deal with like inner or outside.

 Makes these tables look a lot nicer. But what's gonna happen when we're working with borders is we're gonna come into a challenge where the last border you do is the one that's on top. So check this out. So if I have this header, how I did that is I just went up here, selected this color green and selected that, and we have, let's do a thick line there, and then I want to, oh, and then I think, okay, I wanna have this all in black.

Okay, let.  do the same thing there. Change this color here. Oh, I don't want that. I want it just the outside. Now see that this line separating the header and the text is now black. If we don't want that, we have to go back up and do the top header again.  last. So whatever border you do last is on top. You can definitely get around this by say, do insert a line below and giving like a little bit of a distance between them, right?

So now you don't have to fight over which border is on there. You can do that and that makes nice tables too. You don't necessarily have to have the header connect.  to the table, you can separate it and then use these borders to bring them together. Also, one interesting thing I've noticed is you can, let me disregard that.

If you have two tables, say you have two tables next to each other, separate with a little bit of a, let's do that. Let's separate them. , let's move my face over here. But you wanna like connect this information. You can change these colors to, you don't have to change the bottom one, right? You only have to change this top one to say, oh, these are different things.

You can say, oh, here, this is maybe a projection. Maybe this is like a dire projection and this is a good projection. And now let's take that away. Now you clearly see like, oh, these two tables are very similar. Like the text is gonna be similar, data is gonna be. Similar data, but now I know, oh, this is a good one, this is a bad one.

And I see that by the color. Really, really cute way. You can do things here. You can also ab absolutely, you have full control over the color. You can even do custom colors here. You can do pastels, you can do like a, let's do like that, right? There. , you can do different shades if you want to go through shades of yellow or red, if you wanna say, this is a, a dire one, and this is a less dire projection.

And that's a bunch of cool ways to communicate better with grid lines and with or without grid lines, actually with borders. , thanks so much for watching.

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