Don't Draw Attention to the Header

Beginner

About this Tutorial

Common mistake is highlighting the header of a table in a bold color.

Video Transcript

<div> Hey. So in this video I'm actually gonna share with you, not necessarily something you should do, but something you should not be doing, which is drawing attention to headers when creating a table . Very common. This is like a hundred percent of people do this now, and I just, if find it like a weird pet peeve, whenever we create a table , we go to that, that top right. And we'll, we might, you know, drop down the Freeze freeze row here. So we can scroll through it and then we might like fold it, fold it, and then we might put it in the center.

But if we wanna color it, a lot of times people will like color the damn thing, whole damn thing. Maybe even like a stark black with a white text. And like this generally does look. Like you want to wrap your words, wrap your tables. You might have alternating colors in here to make it nice. I have another video about that. But what, why this is strange to me and why this is a potentially a bad thing to sort of draw attention to the header is that when we're sharing a table or, or data , we, we want to actually. We're sharing information, right? We're sharing a story.

We we're trying to draw the attention to something. And never is that thing, the header where we don't want to tell the story of the header . The header is a tool to tell you what the data means as a category. So, The easiest, simplest way around this is to use pastels with this like very faint top line. And what I also do is do the text not in a black so that it stays the same. I try to make it a little bit different, like maybe like the dark version of that color so that your eye. Doesn't think it is data . And then you can use alternating colors here.

But also I do a lot of conditional formatting over in the data to really draw out the story. And whatever your. Your data is telling you, or whatever place you're working at. I would say use a common color. So if you are working at a company and you have say, like a specific colors in the logo, I would use those up in the. Header . Why? Because you're gonna be used to those colors. They're not gonna draw attention. Maybe initially, like the first time you present a table that is in the custom colors of the company, you're absolutely going to draw attention to it, but.

Before, not before too long. You're, that is gonna fade into the background and you're not gonna think about it anymore. How you do that is you go down here to custom color. You can put any color here. So just get the hex code of your company's colors and use that in your fill. Cell fill and, and the text color might be really, it might be also a really nice touch that you can share internal data with, with the colors of your company. But yeah, I would use some like soft pet pastels. I would even bring down the the intensity.

I don't like bolding the header , like, let it live in the background a little, let it let the eye not take everything over to it. And that's my tip of the day.</div>