STOP Making These Excel Formatting Mistakes | Format the Right Way

proper use of excel formatting can significantly impact the speed and Clarity in which users can work with and interpret your spreadsheets formatting enables you to highlight essential information direct users and encode data now effective formatting subtly enhances usability while poor formatting can be nothing but a distraction let me show you the formatting that drives me crazy by default in Excel numbers are aligned right and text aligned left don't mess with numbers by centering them keep the ones tens and hundreds lined up so they're easy to read if you have numbers in the thousands or higher put a comma separator in them it just makes them instantly easier to read if the numbers are greater than a th000 the decimals are immaterial round them so the important information is easy to see repetition of currency labels just adds unnecessary noise instead label the header of the column and if there's a chance it could be confused with other currencies that share the same symbol add the currency name I've said it before merged cells are a pain in the for example if I want to sum the values in this column the minute I hit aemerge cell my range gets messed up now I know I can hold control and select non-contiguous ranges but that's just more work than I need to do and if I make a mistake it's a pain instead you should be using Center across selection so with it selected I'm going to contr 1 on the alignment tab you want Center across selection when you format cells like this entering a sum and referencing the column is super easy and quick avoid making people turn their head to read labels where possible these tables are more timec consuming to interpret because the region labels are off to one side and require more effort to read than these labels these labels allow you to read in a logical top to bottom order I've never worked out why people Zoom way out on a worksheet only to then increase the font size so they can read it but I see it a lot the only thing at achieves is smaller font in the column and row labels but they hardly take up much space anyway if you must zoom out Simply stop when you can still read the font too many fonts sah fonts comic Sands and the like are all inappropriate for most business scenarios keep it simple and stick to no more than three different fonts in a spreadsheet and choose fonts that are easy to to read and complement one another or instead of different fonts you could use different font sizes or bold to differentiate headings Etc here's an anonymized example of a real workbook I was sent by someone asking for Excel help the colored headings are way too much plus the pink and red fill colors make the font very difficult to read color is a great tool to categorize data and communicate information but you can do it with subtle colors too or consider whether you need every every column colored because when everything is colored nothing stands out by default XL has grid lines turned on so there's no need to add cell borders to a table these extra borders unnecessarily bloat your file and create a busy workspace if you want to hide the grid lines for the header area simply select the cells and give them a white fill color that way we don't need these grid lines here this will result in a much smaller file and you won't have the hassle of grid lines disappearing if you cut and past to sell and if you want to see grid lines when you print you can turn them on on the page layout tab in the page setup Dialogue on the sheet Tab and then grid lines that way when you print they'll print too if you have some formatting gripes please share them in the comments I hope you found this video useful if you liked it please give it the Thumbs Up And subscribe to our channel for more

Channel: MyOnlineTrainingHub

Views: 28,744

Keywords: Mynda Treacy, My Online Training Hub, Excel formatting, Excle formating, things not to do in excel, stop doing these in excel, mistakes in excel, mistakes in excel formatting, don't make these mistakes in excel, conditional formatting, conditional formatting in excel, what not to do in excel, don't do this in excel, things you're doing wrong in excel, excel tips, excel tips & tricks, excel for beginners, excel tutorial

Id: E-biTPeOTMg

Length: 3min 53sec (233 seconds)

Published: Tue Jun 06 2023