Think about MIDDLE vs CENTER Alignment!

0:00 I think knowing this is going to improve the look and feel of your spreadsheets. Very quickly. So there's a concept of middle and center alignment, and these are two very different things, but I wanna show you where they occur and what you can do to change your look and feel of your spreadsheet data . So up in the menu bar with all these icons over on the right side, there's horizontal align and there's vertical align . And these two obviously do separate things. Horizontal align will move your data from left. To right. Vertical align will move your data up and down. Both of these will be within the cell, but thinking about this actually helps your sheet a lot.

0:45 In horizontal Align , we have center and in vertical align , we have middle. So if we wanna say middle and center, we mean vertically and horizontally. Everything is centered within the cell. If we look at our data now, we can see this sort of name is in the middle and center, whereas the sails are in the bottom right. So what I like to do is I like to take all of my rows and just hit center and hit middle. Now, what this does is it just aligns everything exactly in rows and columns. Now, most of the time, actually this is going to look nice. However, there are a few things that I wanna share that are gonna make your

1:32 sheet look nicer and your data look nicer. That is not just middle and center, for example, numbers. These particular numbers in sales, they're all two digits. Look fine. However, if we get into the three digits. Things don't really look that great. I mean, it looks great, but it doesn't actually function well because you need to be able to see the difference between two digits and three digits very easily and very precisely. What's going on is that it's all center aligned, so you only have a half of a digit on the left side and a half of a digit on the right side. Difference between two and three. Numbers. Also, we do not have things like monospace. So we can change this to a monospace and it's gonna look a little bit

2:20 better functionally, maybe not aesthetically, but if we move it to the right, we'll now clearly see no matter what, that there is a difference between two and three numbers. Same with this percentage over here, percentages. Especially because we have 0.00. So we have. Numbers on the right and the left side of a dot. What I like to do is I like to put these into monospace and align them to the right. You may want to change the size of these things because the fonts might be different sizes. It's okay. But no matter what, I do think that vertical line in the middle for all of the rows is fairly good. There is not necessarily any particular reason that I can think of right now

3:08 to unalign these in the middle across, but I just gave you the number example. Why you might want horizontal alignment to the right and not center for everything. But what I do like about middle and center alignment is that it keeps the relationship of the rows and the, and the columns exact, because spreadsheets are just rows and columns and the relationship of rows and columns are very sacrosanct, are very center to the idea of spreadsheets. We actually want to be able to see, okay, this row is all a particular month. That is separate from the next row. One other thing you can do is probably like different background colors. If you wanna really separate those, that's totally fine too, and actually is helpful in reading these sheets. And header . Let's talk about the

3:55 Is that good to be middle and center alignment? I think so. There is a little bit of a visual, uh, let's say error looks like whenever there's like this percent of the year has this space on the right and everything. In that column is aligned to the right, but I think you can do something very easily, which is double click on the width. Especially these that are larger than the, the header is larger than the cell components. Now there is that not that space so quickly we, we get. That outta the way, but we also keep it centered, aligned, and middle aligned. You don't need to change that.

4:41 Also, I like to make these as small words as possible. All caps is fine to sort of make it all look the same. Let's double click on that. It's just gonna add a little bit, but you see now there's no. Space after the S in sales, and it aligns well with the numbers here. I like also sometimes not even having a header , sometimes less is more. If you know this is just an indication of the highest, you don't necessarily need to say that. It's just gonna have it there. If we change that, we can see the highest changes. We don't necessarily need to label it, and I think that also makes our sheets look way better and also doesn't mean, and also means that we don't need to use middle or center alignment when there's nothing there.

5:27 Hopefully that was really fun and interesting for you to increase the nice look and feel of your spreadsheets and give you an extra idea of form and function when we write align numbers and use monospace fonts for numbers. You are watching better sheets here on YouTube. Make sure you check out this video or this video and subscribe right now to get more tips, tricks, how tos, get more out of your Google sheets than you ever have before. I'm excited to be making a ton more videos here. Ask me questions down in the comments and I will answer them in future videos. But for right now, right here, one of these videos is gonna be your next Google sheet.