17 Excel Beginner Formatting Mistakes (AND HOW TO FIX THEM!

It’s so difficult as a beginner in Excel – how to format a spreadsheet when there’s so many formatting options available?  Well, one way to start is to avoid common Excel formatting mistakes.  In this video, we’ve listed our 17 Excel beginner formatting mistakes and included simple techniques to avoid them.  These Excel beginner tips and tricks should make formatting easy and help simplify the complex topic of data presentation.

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In the video, I show you two spreadsheets that, at first glance at least, seem completely different.  In fact, the two worksheets contain the same data – it’s just they’ve been formatted differently.  Very differently! Download the Excel sample file and ask yourself, ‘Which would you rather work with?’

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Topics :

00:00 Two Worksheets

00:46 FREE Excel Data Analysis Crash Course

01:15 Working from centre

01:41 Merging of cells

02:20 Column and row headers disabled

02:49 Not at 100% zoom

03:13 Lack of horizontal borders (with gridlines off)

03:40 No buffer columns or rows

04:12 Too many colours generally

05:43 Colour fill to end of column / row

06:38 Background graphics (please no!)

07:10 No contrast between font and background

08:17 Insufficient column width (####)

08:42 Inconsistent column widths

10:00 Inconsistent row heights

10:48 Simply using default font - usually Calibri

11:22 Not using bold

11:48 Not using upper case

12:40 Lack of sense of column 'grouping'

The fact is Excel formatting is one way to differentiate yourself as a data analyst.  I’ve meet thousands of people who can do formulae, pivot tables, VBA etc.  But relatively few who can step into the mind of the user and seriously consider what it would be like for somebody else to encounter your spreadsheet for the first time.  Applied correctly, Excel formatting can not just incline, but actually ‘compel’ people to engage with your data.  I’ve found, over the years, it’s helped my Excel work stand out – and perhaps these tips and techniques could help you too?

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