While the content of the spreadsheet is complete, the design isnβt finished yet. I think the best spreadsheets are “scannable”, in other words the reader can scan the sheet and get a sense of the pattern of information, before they even read it. I want the reader to be able to see at a glance whether it is a Facebook or Twitter Post, and to have a sense of the time of day the post will occur. Colour is going to make this happen. Since I have no intention of manually formatting the calendar, Conditional Formatting will make this happen.
I am a big fan of conditional formatting, but the working dialog where formulas are added leaves a lot to be desired. So when I base a conditional format on a formula, I will typically build the formula in the spreadsheet so it can be tested and then copy it out of the formula bar and paste it into the working dialog. In this spreadsheet I have 12 (TWELVE) conditional formats, so I ended up pasting the formulas into notepad, so that I could jump back and forth without having to close/reopen the dialog box repeatedly.
I thought quite a bit about how I wanted different times to be represented by colour. I eventually decided on 6 different time “zones”.
- 10 pm to 7 am
- 7 am to 9 am
- 9 am to 12 pm
- 12 pm to 3 pm
- 3 pm to 6 pm
- 6 pm to 10 pm
I needed to find the excel versions of those, so I went to an empty spreadsheet, typed in the time and removed the time format. This is what I found:
Here are the series of formulas I used for conditional formatting, the first in each group is the default which will format the 10 pm to 7 am time entries.
=(C5=”FB”)
=AND(C5=”FB”,B5>=0.292,B5<0.375)
=AND(C5=”FB”,B5>=0.375,B5<0.5)
=AND(C5=”FB”,B5>=0.5,B5<0.625)
=AND(C5=”FB”,B5>=0.625,B5<0.75)
=AND(C5=”FB”,B5>=0.75,B5<0.917)
=(C5=”TW”)
=AND(C5=”TW”,B5>=0.292,B5<0.375)
=AND(C5=”TW”,B5>=0.375,B5<0.5)
=AND(C5=”TW”,B5>=0.5,B5<0.625)
=AND(C5=”TW”,B5>=0.625,B5<0.75)
=AND(C5=”TW”,B5>=0.75,B5<0.917)
I chose two different colours, based on the http://colorbrewer2.org/ color blind safe palettes and then picked increasingly darker shades of each colour.
And that wraps up this spreadsheet build! I hope you found this look at my process interesting, and I hope that you find building your spreadsheets as creatively satisfying as I do.
I offer Excel template design services and training. Feel free to send me an email – catharine@mytechgenie.ca
Headline image by Kelly Sikkema