The 9 Best Google Sheets Formatting Tips for Creating Professional-Looking Spreadsheets

There are so many ways to make Google Sheets look beautiful to impress with your data visuals. The majority of spreadsheet apps focus on the computation part, leaving the data visualization and formatting to the user.

Therefore, if you don't format your spreadsheet carefully, the audience may find it boring, since plain and simple data is not interesting. The same goes for Google Sheets.

Here are some formatting tips you can use to help design your Google Sheets worksheet so that the audience finds it professional and understands it instantly.

1. Select the Right Font for Readability

The typeface is vital for your worksheet since readability, professional look, and cell length depend on it. For Google Sheets, you can’t go wrong if you choose any sans-serif font.

Sans-serif fonts increase the clarity and aesthetics of the worksheet. You also need to limit the font usage to up to two different fonts. You may reserve one typeface for the column header texts (Roboto) and the other for the actual data (Roboto Mono) in rows.

For a better understanding, you can use the Google Font pairing tool.

2. Include Sufficient White Space

It’s important to leave enough blank space around tables, charts, images, drawings, and pivot tables. Your audience will prefer abundant white space on your worksheet. White space increases the clarity of texts and numbers in any spreadsheet.

You can remove the Gridlines and use strategic Borders according to the data visualization plan, as it'll further increase the white space in the worksheet. You may also look for scopes to use whole numbers instead of decimal numbers.

3. Follow a Uniform Data Alignment Style

Horizontal alignment plays a significant role in guiding your audience through the data. If you use too many variations in alignment, especially for lengthy data, the audience will find it tricky to relate the header and data column. You might want to follow these basic rules:

1. Left Horizontal align for the data column that contains text or elements treated as texts.
2. Right Horizontal align for the column that’ll contain numbers. You can also do that for numbers with decimals.
3. Column headers should have a similar Horizontal align as the column beneath them.

You can also use Text wrapping, to appropriately visualize long texts in the columns or rows.

4. Use Contrasting Shades for Alternating Rows

The audience will easily grasp the data if you introduce an alternating coloring scheme for each row. The light gray and white or light blue and white color pairing work perfectly. You don’t need to do that manually for each row.

You can use the Alternating colors command in Google Sheets. Access the Format option in the toolbar and select Alternating colors to activate the function. On the right-side panel, you can customize the shades, header color, footer color, and so on.

5. Resize Gridlines to Increase Readability

Google Sheets offer an organized structure for large data chunks like texts, emails, URLs, and numeric data. Therefore, many data practitioners use Sheets to store or present data.

However, Google Sheets cells offer a space of up to 100×21 pixels by default. That doesn’t mean a part of long texts or emails will have to stay hidden. You can manually adjust the cell width and height. You can try the following:

1. Press Ctrl + A to select the entire sheet.
2. Double-click on the border of two Column Letters. For example, between column letters A and B.

3. The worksheet will automatically adjust the cell width depending on the data.
4. You can also double-click on the border of two Row Letters to automatically adjust the cell height.

6. Add Conditional Formatting

Conditional formatting enables you to highlight data automatically and save time on manual formatting. If the data in a cell meets any preset condition, Sheets will automatically format the content of that cell.

You’ll find up to 18 conditions in Google Sheets' conditional formatting menu. But, you can also create a custom condition. A few predefined conditions are: Text contains, Date is, Greater than, Less than, and so on.

The above image shows automatic identification of scores below 80% by using the Conditional formatting command under the Format menu of the Google Sheets toolbar.

Related: Crazy Google Sheets Formulas That Are Extremely Useful

7. Use Appropriate Headers for Tables

You can make your data tables look professional with appropriate headers. Header texts also help the audience to get a preliminary understanding of the data.

You can use a bold font weight for the table header text, where all letters should be capitalized. You may use all-caps for secondary headers in your table, but don't use a Bold font weight.

For units of measurement, write them in small letters and keep them within parenthesis. Don’t forget to add contrasting Fill color and Text color for the header row.

Use the Paint format command to export formatting to different table headers. Click once on the Paint format to apply formatting in one cell or a range of cells.

8. Freeze Rows and Columns as Needed

For long and large sets of data, scrolling can be a problem. Since the header scrolls away, the audience may forget the column headers soon. To help the viewers, you can freeze specific columns and rows so that headers stay in place, and you can easily scroll through long data sets.

To pin a set of rows or columns, try the following:

1. Click on the cell where you want to freeze rows and columns.
2. Then, click View on the toolbar and then hover the cursor over Freeze.
3. Now, choose the number of rows to freeze from the top.
4. Alternatively, select the Up to column to pin the column.

9. Create Colorful Charts

Simply, select the range of data that you want to include in the chart and head over to the Insert tab on the toolbar. Now, click on Chart to insert one automatically. For better visibility, you might want to personalize the chart colors.

Double-click on any white space in the chart to bring up the Chart editor panel on the right-side. Now, you can personalize many options like Chart style, Series, Legend, and so on.

Related: How to Make a 3D Map in Excel

Spreadsheets Don’t Have to Be Boring

By following the above-mentioned style/formatting guides, you will be able to customize your Google Sheets worksheets quickly and easily. You can also create a blank template with these formatting ideas for regular tasks performed on Sheets.

Moreover, create Macros for styling/formatting and use them whenever you create a new sheet in the same worksheet.