All language subtitles for 2. Improving Readability with Cell Styles

So throughout this section, we're going to start to take a look at some of the things that I mentioned

in the previous lesson when we were talking about the golden rules of spreadsheet design.

And the first one I'm going to talk to you about is how to use cell styles in your workbooks to help

improve readability.

And I always find that cell style seems to be one of those things that I don't see a lot of people using,

but can be extremely helpful, particularly if you're going to be sharing your workbook with a lot of

other people.

Cell styles effectively tell people what type of cell they're using.

So what exactly do I mean by that?

Well, I have my spreadsheet just here.

We have some basic data on it, just some invoice numbers for some clients.

I have an amount column.

I have the amount of VAT.

So VAT is 20 percent of the amounts.

And then I have a simple sum calculation in column F to work out the total of that invoice.

Now, if this is a worksheet that I'm sharing with other people in my team, maybe other people are

going to be adding more invoices onto the bottom of this.

And I want to make it super clear to everybody who's using this spreadsheet, which sells, they can

type into which cells contain formulas, which cells are headings, so on and so forth.

And I can do that by using color in the form of cell styles.

So if we go up to the home tab, we have a cell styles dropdown and we have numerous different default

cell styles that we can apply to different cells in our worksheet.

Now it's worth noting that the colors that you see here, particularly these theme cell styles at the

bottom, are all based on the theme that you currently have in use in Excel.

So I'm using the standard office theme, and this is the color palette that comes with this theme,

and all of the cell styles are divided down into different categories.

And all this really is is formatting.

So you'll see as I hover over some of these, you can just see behind where I have this dropdown.

The cell is changing depending on which one of these I've selected.

And of course, if you don't like the colors or the format of these or you have a very specific color

palette that you need to use at your organization, all of these can be modified and updated to reflect

your own colors.

For example, if I didn't like the way that this calculation cell style looked, I could right click.

I can go in to modify and I can change the format of that particular cell style.

So you can change these.

Now, we're not going to do that right now.

I just want to show you how in general, I would use these in this type of worksheet.

So if I take a look at my data, I want to let people know which cells they need to input information

into.

And that is going to be all of these cells just here.

So other people would need to enter in the invoice number, the date, the client and the amount.

But VAT and total are calculated using formulas.

So I want to denote these cells just here as input cells.

So we're going to select them, go up to cell styles, and I'm going to choose this one just here inputs.

Now it might be that you definitely do want to go in and change this formatting.

A lot of people don't necessarily like this orange background.

Fill with this blue writing.

So if you don't like it, just remember you can change that.

Now these are the two columns contain formulas or calculations.

So I'm going to select this group of cells, and I'm going to let people know that these are calculation

cells.

So simply by the use of cell styles, it's fairly obvious to see which ones are input and which ones

are calculations.

Now this VAT rate over here, I'm going to let people input whatever they need to input into here,

because that might change.

So I'm going to denote that as an input cell as well, and I have a title at the top.

So maybe I want to select these cells and denote that as a heading to and I could carry on going.

I can even create my own new cell styles from here as well.

So if you want to create your own, you can definitely do that also.

And then what I would generally tend to do is create a welcome sheet at the beginning, which has a

legend on air that explains what these cell styles are.

So I might put something like input cell.

Let's just add two of these that we're using.

And I might put something like input values into these cells, and then I might have calculation cells

just so it's super clear for anybody looking at this worksheet.

So that is basically how you use cell styles.

It's simply formatting, which lets other people know what type of data goes into the worksheet and

where they should be typing.