If you’re anything like me, you spend WAY too much time trying to get spreadsheets to look good. Thoughtful configuration of colours and cell formatting in Excel takes time. Then, once you’ve created your visual masterpiece, you’re only one disparaging remark away from feeling your efforts have come to nothing! Or, you come back the next day and say ‘What on earth was I thinking?!’ I know, I’ve been there many times …

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With an infinite range of formatting options available in Excel, how can we simplify? What’s the 20% effort that generates 80% of the impact? And allows us to focus on the technical aspect of getting a spreadsheet to work consistently and without errors – which is surely more important than getting things looking nice. At least I think so …

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It’s exactly what I’ve done in the last few years of my career. In fact, I’ve done more than that. First, I developed a twocolour approach to Excel formatting to create visuallyappealing spreadsheets quickly … using just two colours. I found this worked well: satisfying my need for a strong aesthetic whilst winning occasional moderate praise from clients. Or, they’d save ‘I can tell you made this spreadsheet!’ – which told me the approach was at least ‘distinctive’.

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But I took things further: I created a singlecolour approach. Yes, to get your spreadsheets looking good, I believe you only need apply one colour. The approach is quick, easy and, if you stick around for the 10minute video, I’m confident you’ll use it for the rest of your career, so make sure you watch the video, download the Excel download file, and work along with me.

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