Aesthetics Teaser: How To Use Alternating Colors

Beginner

About this Tutorial

How to use alternating colors in your spreadsheets.

Featured Formulas

RANK()

Video Transcript

<div> Hey, thanks for watching this free tutorial. This is about aesthetics and it's generally just like an introduction to what I think are some really good basic foundations of displaying data in a pleasing, easy to read way. Lots more in the paid portion of. Better sheets. And I'll also answer questions as long as you have them. Even if you have questions right now, email me andrew campy approved.com. I'll put my email address right here so you can see it. Andrew campy approved.com. The email me any questions you have if you are buying better sheets, buying a membership or not.

Go ahead, email me. So what we're doing today is we are gonna take this data , which is a pretty basic sort of five people had some point system. Maybe it was fantasy football, maybe it was like a sales thing in a office. But we have the results and we have the winner here. This is a formula that I go much deeper into in the In the paid version of Better Sheets, I have some cool tutorials showing you index matches an awesome version of the lookup. If you know that I will go however into how to do ranking and.

Generally we're gonna turn this into this, so a much easier to see, read a way to see, okay, Gary's a winner. Here's the ranks one through five. And we're gonna change this into this. Cool.

This will hopefully show you a few really cool to tools and features of Google Sheets. You may not have known all of them or may not have seen this particular use case, but it's also going to share with you my particular style where I like to go through projects and I like to show you how to do something by doing it and showing sharing with you, like really unique use cases of all of these tools all put together. So the very first thing, actually first thing we're gonna do is duplicate . So we have a version of it.

We are gonna actually move some of these around cuz really you might not have had these all in order. They might be out of order. So what the first thing we're gonna do, we see that the winners over here on the right and people normally when they read from the top left to the bottom right. So left to right and top bottom to down to the bottom. And here we have the winner, Gary, over here. So we also have taken some assumptions. We're done with this. We're not gonna be changing this anytime soon. We just need to display this information.

So what we can do is we can get rid of this this nice header bar that makes it really easy to scroll up and down. We have five people. We're done with that, but it makes it really nice and easy to move around. We're gonna move all of this. We're gonna do command X and cut and move it over here a couple rows. We're gonna move Winter Gary to the center. Actually we're gonna move Winter Gary down here. We're also gonna move everything down. One more. We're just gonna create a little bit of a separation between the winner here and the every, all our results.

We're gonna make some space around the table . That just adds, adding more white space. Let's the eye breathe a little. We have, this is a very common thing with Google Sheets. We put everything up into the left, but when we just wanna display this in a nice way, we can give the separation, give the eyes some room to breathe. We want to. Center the headers . So we just click over here, center and early. Fun keyword keyboard hack is that you can do command Y on the keyboard and redo what you just did. So I went on a, whatever the last thing I did, I centered Do it again and do winter.

And Gary, I'm gonna center it again. I'm gonna command y touch that. And now this is more aesthetically pleasing than this. We're on our way. What I want to do is I want to also create a bigger font size. Cause right now everything is the same font size. So winner and Gary are gonna just put up the double Ooh, nice but winner and wow. Really look big. So we're gonna put that down in 15. And one thing is we want to hide the lines. So we just go view uncheck grid lines. And now we have a lot of white space, really nicely. Now we're able to breathe a little.

What I want to do now is I wanna show you how to do alternating colors . And this is a really fun thing. So I just click on the table that I want to do alternating colors on, including the, this header row . So I just click and drag over all of that. And I go over here to the fill color . I click on that. Oh, right behind. Hello. Behind my face. I'll move myself over, is alternating colors down here on the very bottom of this fill color . So I'm gonna click it. Let me move myself back over here. And I can select any of these preset default styles. They're really just one color.

I do like to just go with that, rarely at the beginning. Let's go with a nice yellow maybe, or let's go with this blue. But one thing that I do not like about these preset ones is this header is so much different than the results and the head. Doesn't give you any information like it, especially if we were like familiar with what the header is and we just need to see it once and then we'll now see it. What it is, we don't need to continually see it. We, the eye is drawn right now. The most color is right here on the header .

So what I do is I like to change the header color and I'd just like to take it down a couple notches. See it's still. But it's all within the same color. Less contrast is nicer to the eye. The la next thing I'll do is I'm going to grade the data . So this again, is. We are, we want to help the eye in a number of different ways. So actually, I'm gonna click down over here. We wanna help the eye get to what it's most needed right away, right? We wanna know the winner, but we also wanna see this information, but we don't care about it as much as the winner, right?

So I'm gonna just select everything and I'm gonna take the color down, just three notches. Okay? Two notches. And see then it's still read. I can still read it, but it's just a little kinder to the eye, and now winner just pops out. You can also take this down a little bit. You can take everything down. Even winner. You can take him down. He still pops. He's still there. He's still a winner. Now if you notice, we want to rank, we want everything in order, right? We have the rank, but we want them in order.

We wanna see oh, Gary is at the top. One thing you can do if we had kept this data at the top, and one reason why you do keep the data at the top is so you can do this sort . So if everything, let's just move, you know these out of. Order a little bit. Let's just move it out of order. And if you did this, click here and this might be easy to do, but it might be a little bit harder here. So what you can do if you are not familiar yet, is click on the row or the, sorry, the column that you want to order by . Click Andra the entire thing over here, and now go up to data and.

Now you have this sort sheet here, but you also have sort range and you can sort range A to Z . So small to high to low. We wanna do small to high cuz it's a rank and we can rank that if I had done this way. Now data says sort range by column B, so it's always the column that we start with. So if that was the case, this is how it would A to Z Arnold through Tracy. But we really want the. So we click and drag from the rank column. We don't include anything that we don't want to switch around, so we if for this one, we're not including the header.

Now we go to data rank A to Z , and here's why I like alternating colors , because we could have. Done this manually. It was only five people, so it was really coloring like three things, obviously with when you have a list of 20 or 30 or 40, you want to do that, but also did you notice that I did not have to redo the alternating colors ? I think alternating color is one of the coolest things that Google Sheets has put in here as a. As a real feature because it's just automatic, it just works, right? I don't have to redo it.

I can still mess around with this and I don't have to do anything. It's really cool. One more thing that I personally have found really frustrating about Google Sheets is when I look at this, I am only seeing five rows of data . I don't need a thousand rows and I don't need 26 column, right? If I scroll up down really quick right now, oops. If I scroll down really quick, I'm, I don't know where I am. So to prevent that, I just delete every single other. Except the two on the sides. And let's just give a little space in the bottom. Yeah, that's it.

And now every column is the same size, but we don't care about these two columns. We just want them for white space. So we are gonna, I'm gonna click on a, and then I'm gonna hold down command on the, I'm on a map and click E, and I'm. Make 'em a little smaller. So now all of the focus is on this table . There's not excessive white space. There's not excessive rows or columns. And we have a pretty darn close to Gary the, or this winter one that we were looking for. We can maybe make the the text a little bit larger. To make it easier to read.

What I like to do also is keep the headers down low and we can still read them, but now we see that data really nicely. Right now we see, okay, Gary's a winner. Oh, here he is. And reading down from the top to the bottom. Very easy to read. N a lot better than this data , right? A lot better aesthetics to see this. Clearly. This is the information I want, the points, the rank, the winner. And here's a cool thing too. This index match , if you join today I go into index match the lot. I love this. It's like a v ray, a v lookup. That's just so much better. It works automatically.

So I don't have to copy and paste this anymore if we did this wrong. Oh, Tracy was supposed to have 323 and Gary was supposed to have 2 31. See, that automatically changes. The ranks automatically change. Oh, let me share with you what the rank is. So rank is cool function if you're not familiar with it. Actually I'll retype it here. Rank. This value. And we want the second argument is the the range and then the column is we want it ascending. Actually we want it descending. So we want a zero. We want it most points is the best. And we see there and what's gonna happen.

I want, I'm gonna share with you something really to avoid if I click and drag down. Everything looks good, except it doesn't. You think, oh, so what happens is I need to go up here and in between C and the sixth of the, this is the row. I need to hold this row hostage, right? And I put a little dollar sign there that's what I think I'm holding it for ransom. You're not going to get this away from me. And so I hold that and now I click and drag and now we get the actual ranks. So that's something to watch out for.

When you're doing rank and you're doing the, this range you have to use this dollar sign , which really holds that number and it doesn't change. You want that ranking for. So click and drag this delete. And notice also to avoid, if I add data , it automatically shows these alternating colors . But if I delete that data , it doesn't. And even if I do command and ha backslash, it doesn't fix it. So what I have to do, and this is a little hard or challenge to. But I go back to alternating colors . Let's move and I have to change the range up here to D, B to D. And that fixes it.

So that fixes that. And hopefully you enjoyed this tutorial. Hopefully you learned a lot about Google Sheets and how you can make your Google Sheets way better. Please consider signing up and subscribing. To the paid version, and we'll go a lot deeper into formulas. We'll go a lot deeper into even more aesthetics that I think are really fun and make our data pop and share information in really good ways like data viz. We can do some really cool charts. But yeah keep learning. I have a few other v free videos.

Please feel free to watch them and learn something about Google Sheets and how to make your Google sheets better. Thanks.</div>