Excel is a powerful numbers tool, no question. Most of the time when we talk about spreadsheets we are focusing on the mathematical side, rather than how the results look.

Thing is, spreadsheets are a tool for creating content to be read also. In fact, I would go as far as to say a spreadsheet is an influential tool of persuasion, when used correctly.

On top of that, many business rely on Excel for their business forms, such as invoices, expenses, time sheets and all kinds of paperwork.

It is possible to not only have your spreadsheets make you more productive, but also look good.

In this series I want to show you how you can beautify your spreadsheets without requiring any real design skills.

Formatting Reports With Spreadsheets

Although the features available in the latest software surpass anything that came before, this use of spreadsheets is not a new thing, can you remember the old Lotus 123 and Supercalc days?

Even back then, spreadsheets were used to make data more presentable, more professional, and less, well, like it had come straight off a music-ruled dotmatrix report, which was often the main alternative.

Of course back then a lot of the data was retyped, causing inevitable transcription errors. Now Excel can read in data exported from numerous systems natively, and also understand common open formats, even down to interrogating live databases directly through ODBC.

So this is not just about spreadsheets you create form scratch, Excels presentation abilities can help you with presenting any kind of data that Excel can import.

Things have come a long way. In the past you were pretty much restricted to having lines, boxes, bold and italic. If you were lucky. Now Excel has features only previously found in desk top publishing packages.

Excel’s graphic features are both a blessing and a curse.

Yes, you have a huge amount of freedom and functionality to create the look you want, but the downside is a lot of people over use these features and make their spreadsheets look like a Nascar, and reports appear to be a page from a comic book.

Let’s focus on some basics!

10 Tips for Avoiding Excel Formatting Horrors

Excel Design Tip 1: Less is More

When working with the formatting and design features of Excel please do not treat it like a kid in a candy store!

Restraint is important if you want to provide the best possible result.

Excel Design Tip 2: Comic Sans has no place in business

Sometimes I wish I could build a time machine so I could go back to whichever lunatic was presiding over the meeting when Microsoft decided to bundle Comic Sans with their operating system and give them a sound thrashing.

Ahem.

If there is one thing that will reduce the professionalism of your spreadsheet it is the inclusion of any kind of comic font, but in particular Comic Sans. Just don’t.

Excel Design Tip 3: WordArt can kill your design

WordArt is a nice and flexible feature that has been an addition of Office for years. Many people are comfortable with it. But does it ever look cheesy! Just look at the header image of this article - geeky, no?

You know where we agreed restraint was important a few paragraphs ago? That goes one hundred fold for when using WordArt. In fact, if in doubt, leave it out!

Excel Design Tip 4: Clipart Clichés

Photography or illustration can bring a page to life and stop it being a sea of text and numbers, but if the clipart looks over-used, out of place, hackneyed or just plain BAD, then you are only doing damage. I would recommend instead of the default clipart to look to outside sources such as Istockphoto, but there is a similar risk in using those also!

Excel Design Tip 5:  Careful with colors

Color is essential in aiding clarity of your data, providing of course you are going to view the spreadsheet on screen or your printer can output color. What often happens though is people get carried away and the end result is a rainbow mess of clashing, garish, neon. Excel is not the best at allowing color flexibility, so make the best of a bad set of colors by selecting muted tones that go well together, such as grays and blues.

Excel Design Tip 6: Templates are your friend

Rather than starting from scratch, especially if you are design challenged like me, consider trying one of the many freely available pre-built templates out there. You can find everything from invoices to timesheets. There is a great list in our Excel Wizardry article.

Excel Design Tip 7: Use grid lines selectively

Just because you are working in a spreadsheet does not mean you have to show your grid lines. In many cases it is easier to only add the lines that aid legibility, and switch off all othes. In Windows you can find the option to turn off gridlines in the view tab, or in older versions tools, options. In Mac, look in the preferences.

Excel Design Tip 8: Background images can lift or distract

A tasteful background image can work well. Unfortunately all too often the images used are busy, detailed and when combined with columns of numbers, just make your eyes water. Go for something plain and delicate, such as a subtle graduated tint or a slight drop shadow..

Excel Design Tip 9: Align your text

Another legibility tip is for you to not just accept Excels defaults when working with your text. For example did you know you can format your cells and select to align your text at the top and to wrap around?

Excel Design Tip 10: Use appropriate font sizes

Your basic font needs to be large enough to be legible without an electron microscope, plain enough to read (step away from the “handwriting” font!), and there should be a clear visual hierarchy. What do I mean by that? While most people in their wordprocessor will use headlines and subheads, for some reason fewer people think to do this in a spreadsheet, but breaking up a report in this way can really help get your point across. So if you are using 10-12 point body text you might make your subhead 14-16pt and your main headline 18pt.

Summary

Yes, much of this will be seemingly obvious, but if you go into any Excel using business I guarantee at least one and probably more of these excel formatting crimes are being committed right now.

Got Excel design tips? Please share in the comments, and look out for part 2 of this series!

I’m not having an affair or calling dodgy premium lines. Honest!

Part of my work involves a fair amount of time on the telephone. This is fine for consulting calls as the client pays me well for them, but lately I have been doing a lot of interviews since our book and my course were launched.

When you have to pay for your own transatlantic calls that can last an hour or more, you start looking into better options for telephone service!

Of course the first place I turn is Skype, which is brilliant in many ways, especially because I can record, but all too often on calls that go on a while the sound breaks up or drops me entirely, especially over long distances. This is not good in live interviews.

Even though I live in the UK where we are a fair bit behind the US, there are still a confusing array of alternative VOIP service options.

The problem is how to work out the good from the bad? Will any of them be any better than Skype?

Please let me know if you have any recommendations in the comments …

Every thursday night I would sit in front of the television waiting for the “Top of the Pops” television show to come on with tape recorder primed and ready to “steal” my favorite songs of that week.

My piracy and “bootlegging” didn’t stop there. It only got worse.

Once my brother recieved his double-deck tape recorder we went into overdrive. We would make and swap mix tapes. Friends and I would copy computer games. There was no stopping us.

Only then we entered the world of video. Our first VHS machine became a paradise of counterfeit movies. We must of cost Hollywood tens of dollars in missing revenue. Maybe even a hundred dollars of profit. We were that hardcore by that point.

I say all this to establish that when I complain about my own intellectual property being ripped off that I am being a hypocrite.

My first experience of having something of my own “stolen” (in the purely digital intellectual property sense) was when my first book appeared on P2P networks. My friend Tony found it and showed me that it was being distributed by Kazaa or one of the others, I can’t recall. The publisher had offered the book as a PDF and now it was zinging its way around the intertubes with wild abaondon.

I didn’t lose any money, at that time I didn’t get any royalties and was hardly likely to. In fact it probably made me money because the more people who saw my name attached to the book the better. What it likely did do as a downside was make the publisher think twice about their persuing that line of business. Like a cold shower.

Like it or not, unlike my generation, this new generation have grown up with instant access to any media they want. I’m not even sure the thought of buying it enters their heads. My daughter and her friends do not even watch MTV, why would they wait for a popular artist to appear on some schedule when they can watch any music video as and when they like on YouTube? Don’t for a minute think people leave them on YouTube either, look into the right forums and you will see how easy it is for those preferred videos to end up on iPods, and other media players.

People over the age of 20 will likely know the great feeling of purchasing music or a video in a store, something we have been waiting to be released especially. I have seen kids grow tired of music that hasn’t even been released yet. Ripping open packaging is something they only associate with console games, and how long will that last? Games can be downloaded even officially now.

Once a product is entirely ones and zeros, and the culture makes it the norm to copy rather than buy, can we continue to act like the old rules apply?

As a person who makes a living out of content and information, I realize what a perilous situation we have made for ourselves.

What many of us produce now is ephemeral and intangible, where value is in the eye of the beholder, is it the future or just a blip in history?

Back in the day even my hard coded sites would often feature a crumb trail. That is where you can see where you are in the site hierarchy from Home -> Parent -> Current page.

Even though WordPress features the concept of page parents and children, it doesn’t have crumb trail built in.

Luckily Yoast has a plugin that is perfect.

All you have to do is install the plugin and drop in a tiny piece of code into your page template and ta-da, nice and easy crumb trail navigation. I am sure you will agree, it works well …

I love WordPress, but the WordPress community really rocks!

Twitter has rapidly grown far beyond the original “what are you doing” status service idea. More and more wonderfully creative ideas are surfacing around Twitter, such as this reminder service called “Timer“.

The idea is you send Timer a direct message in the following format:

So the number of minutes, followed by a space, followed by the reminder message, eg.

This would send me a reminder in 5 minutes saying “call Peter”.

You get the reminder as a direct message in the following format:

So my previous example would look like this:

Not only that, because it is sent as a direct message, you also get an email. I don’t have my Twitter hooked up to my phone number, but I would assume if you did it would send a SMS text message also.

Now providing I remember to add a reminder I have no excuses for forgetting things

Pretty neat isn’t it?

We had a good run. Lots of great memories.

But I think it is about time I left.

Yes, I have been looking around, I have been seeing others. It’s me, not you. Don’t blame yourself.

People told me you were cheap, but I didn’t mind, in fact I found that charming about you. I liked that you were popular, though I know people thought that meant you were “easy”. Perhaps you did have too many friends now thinking about it, probably too many for you to handle. Half the mess was likely caused by you trying to please too many too often.

I think it is best for both of us that I move on. Don’t worry, you won’t even notice me moving my stuff out.

It’s just I was ready to get serious, and it seems you were not up to that level of commitment. I had grown up, but you just wanted to stick to your old fun ways. I need more than that.

I need to know you will be there when I need you.

Do you take your responsibilities seriously? I’m not sure you do.

A bit of fun is great and all, but, you know, I am looking for you to be by my side through good times and bad. How do you think your behavior reflects on me when I have visitors over?

Sometimes people come to visit and you are not even there. How hard do you think it is to get people to come back? Not easy, I will tell you. And when they do visit and everything is a mess? It’s just not the impression I want to give people.

So, I am sorry, but I have found someone else. Someone that is willing to be a serious partner, who will look after me.

But I will always remember the good times.

Lots of love

Your hosting customer

Up to now most people have used Aweber, Feedblitz and FeedBurner for this, but now they have a new competitor.

MailChimp is a commercial service that takes the idea of “blog to email” and builds it out to be a professional email software tool.

Yes, if you have more than 100 subscribers you have to pay for it. So already it is different to Feedburner and Feedblitz. There are more features though, so it is really more in competition with Aweber.

Now I love Aweber. I have written about how bloggers should use Aweber before. That said, MailChimp is really going for it with additional features that Aweber do not have. Some very cool, but more advanced like an API for programmers.

MailChimp starts at $15 for 500 emails so is competitively priced with Aweber, and there is a free trial.

You can see the full details of what you can do at the MailChimp site.

This is because I have been using it more and more as a Content Management System for traditional sites, rather than just as a blog platform. Combined with the fantastic Thesis theme I have never been so productive as a website builder.

It really is a delight to use, both as a developer and as an end user. If the client can use Hotmail then they are sure to be able to edit their own site in WordPress. This sort of functionality used to cost a lot of money (and still can) but WordPress is capable, flexible and free.

Some people get confused though thinking what I am suggesting is to have a blog look and feel, but that is not the case.

A traditional website can be built very quickly and you would be hard pressed to tell the difference between a WP based site and a hard coded one, on looks alone.

Whites Recycling Solutions is a site I am working on right now (excuse the lack of graphics, it’s a work in progress). The client has already been in and tweaked the content before I even got around to teaching them the system, how is that for ease of use?

You will see the home page is static content, while the “blog” style page is in a tab, under “news“.

No technical fancy work was required, it’s just a settings/reading option:

People who are used to hard-coded or traditional CMS systems often worry about being able to cater to the sorts of request clients often have, such as “I want it to look like this apart from on that page”.

No worries there either, you can have custom page templates which are then selected from a drop down when editing the page, or you can do what I did on me and my friend Ryan’s Credit Card Pundit site and introduce a little WordPress logic.

We wanted the banners for the various types of credit cards to appear on every page apart from the credit cards page, which would have just been ugly duplication.

It couldn’t have been easier!

Translated into English we get “If this is not page ‘8′ then do the following” - easy, eh?

The one problem with WordPress is keeping up with the upgrade cycle, I just wish they would release patches separate from functionality upgrades so people could keep up.

Other than that, I LOVE WordPress … can you tell?

People seemed to be losing the plot a little, getting a touch over excited, calling Chrome a Windows-killer (a browser does not an operating system make, no matter how optimism-fueled). Any ideas that Google was going to take Explorers market share over night is just wishful thinking.

I just thought I would inject some sanity into the proceedings.

I am getting increasingly annoyed with Reddit. Not so much the service, but the voting system.

One of the best, and most frustrating, aspects of Reddit is the fact you can see how many up and down votes a submission has received.

This is a great feature and a surprisingly uncommon one amongst these kinds of social bookmarking services.

Unfortunately great stories get down voted and you have no idea of why. OK, at least on Reddit you can see that you have been down voted, on some competing services you are just left wondering what went on with zero clues.

Now on Mixx you can see not only the votes, but who voted. That is a good start.

The Flaw in Thumb Downs

What would be even better, would be to see who voted, and if they voted, WHY. In theory the comments should tell you, but they don’t. If you actually got some feedback you could improve your next submission, making the whole service much better.

Ideal would be to get actual justifications for down voting, but a compromise would have to be made in the form of check boxes or some sort of list. My concern with that is I don’t think many of the down votes are justified, and giving someone the ability to randomly pick a reason would keep the whole thing going down the same path.

Not All Votes Are Made Equal

A solution to THAT would be to penalize anyone who repeatedly abused the voting system. If they are marking “spam spam spam” perhaps they would have to justify one in five spam submissions, or perhaps they would get flagged as habitual down-voter and their votes count for less.

I’m sure a lot of down votes are simply because the voter has a competing story they want to promote.

Split “Taste-Bias” Votes from “Quality” Votes

At the very least, some distinction needs to be made between “I just don’t like this, it is not to my taste” and “This is factually or morally wrong”. It makes me sick how many times people down vote because they don’t like blogs. Some down votes are because people don’t like commercial and for-profit sites. These same people happily watch cable television stuffed with ads but don’t think web publishers should be allowed to make money from their creativity. You see it in the comments all the time. There are people who actually believe blog = spam, hello?

How would you fix Reddit voting?