Below are some vital functionalities that you can use in your Excel spreadsheets to make your spreadsheets more user-friendly and beautiful for the end-users.
1. Macros and Buttons
You can use macros and buttons to navigate around excel spreadsheets, or create dedicated buttons for printing, hyperlinks to your website, or one that returns you to the cover page of your excel workbook. If you want to make a button that brings you to the next excel worksheet, you first add a button which is under form controls menu. Next, you click the position that you would like the button to be and add a macro to the button by right clicking the button and selecting format control and select the next page.
2. Conditional Formatting
Through the use of conditional formatting, you can highlight important data that fulfills a certain condition. An example of how conditional formatting works is the comparison of two fields: points attained during a mock driving test and points attained during a driving test. Using conditional formatting, participants who improved their score will be highlighted in green, whilst participants whose score deteriorated were highlighted in red. Conditional formatting is useful when you are trying to differentiate a dataset into just a few categories.
3. Simplistic Design
Fancy fonts are simply not suitable to be used in a spreadsheet, you should try to use fonts like Calibri or Arial. You should also refrain from using too many colours as they are distracting and maintain a natural colour tone for the majority of the spreadsheet. Sparse unnatural colour usage enables the highlighted cells to appear of higher importance to the user.
4. Autocomplete
With Excel’s autocomplete function, you can save time on data entry by automatically filling in data in worksheet cells. An example on how to use autocomplete is first filling in the the second cell in the first column as Monday, then use your mouse to hover over and click the bottom right corner of the cell. Next, drag the cursor downwards until you reach the 8th cell in the first column which will be Sunday.
5. Filters
Firstly, click on the data tab then click filter to create a drop-down arrow for the column header cells in the current spreadsheet. To enter the filter menu in Excel, simply click the drop-down arrow for the column that you wish to filter. In the filter menu, simply check the boxes with data that you would like to filter and voila, you have applied a new filter!
6. Hiding and protecting data in an excel spreadsheet
You can hide columns or rows of data by right clicking the data and click Format Cells and navigate to the protection tab to tick the hidden check box to hide the data. Alternatively, you can lock the spreadsheet by right clicking the cells and going to the review tab and selecting protect sheet. You should also enter a password, if not other users will be able to edit the data in the spreadsheets by going to the review tab and selecting unprotect sheet.
