Hi Reader,

Welcome to the Google Sheets Tips newsletter #315, your Monday morning espresso, in spreadsheet form!

I want to start by sharing this extraordinary photo with you:

It was taken last week off the coast of Barcelona. You can see a sailing yacht in the bottom right corner, rather too close for comfort. (Here's what it looked like to the sailors onboard!)

But this is no ordinary sailing yacht.

It's Luna Rossa, the Italian entry in the 37th America's Cup, the oldest international sports competition still running.

These sailing boats are incredible machines. They're Formula 1 cars on water, using hydrofoils to reach speeds of over 60 mph (almost 100 km/h) in 15 mph of wind. It makes for spectacular, high-speed racing.

(The racing runs through to the end of October in case you're interested.)

I was fortunate to do quite a bit of sailing growing up (the slow kind in dinghies though!) and although I don't sail these days, I still love the sport.

Naturally I'm rooting for the British boat, Ineos Britannia, but I'm also cheering on the fast-looking American boat, American Magic.

This competition was my inspiration for today's tip:

➜ Sheets Tip #315: Design inspired by lightning

When people think about spreadsheets, the images that come to mind are dense blocks of numbers. Super boring to look at.

But, Google Sheets is actually a capable design tool. And it's 100% worth it to put some effort into the design of your Google Sheets.

Most of us are not designers by trade. So one of the best ways to improve is to take inspiration from things around us.

Today we'll take inspiration from the scoring table on the America's Cup yacht race website:

Let's recreate this design in a Google Sheet.

To start, we need the raw data in our Google Sheet (the scores are from last week, when I wrote this email):

How do we turn this data into something that resembles the image above?

Convert To Uppercase

To match the original, we need to convert the text in our table to uppercase.

Handily, we have just the function for that in Google Sheets.

In an adjacent column, use the UPPER function to convert text to uppercase, e.g.

=UPPER(C4)

Next, highlight the formula cells, right-click, and choose Copy.

Then right-click and select Paste special to convert to plain text values to replace the original values.

Add A Custom Font

​Typography can make a big difference to how your work is perceived. Is it serious? Playful? Edgy?

In addition to the regular fonts, we can add new fonts from the Google Font Library.

Highlight the data and change the font from the Toolbar. Choose the More fonts option:

In the popup window, type in "Helvetica Neue", which is a font that closely matches the one we're trying to replicate from the website.

Click OK to apply this to our data.

Feel free to experiment with different fonts!

Add Emoji Flags

The original website design has a flag next to each team to denote the nationality. It's a nice visual touch.

To recreate it, we can copy and paste emoji flags into a blank column between the rank and the name.

Go to Emojipedia Flags to find them.

Add A Custom Background Color

I use a Chrome extension called ColorZilla to identify colors on websites.

With ColorZilla, I use the "Pick Color From Page" tool to hover over any part of a website to find out the color code. The tool grabs the hexadecimal code:

In this example, the dark blue has the code #000042

Back in our Google Sheet, highlight the table and the rows above and below, and the columns to the left and right. This will create a nice border around the table.

Go to the Fill color tool (the paint bucket).

Select the plus ⊕ under "CUSTOM" and enter the hex code (#000042) into the Hex box.

Boom! Now we have the nice background color.

Turn the font color to white to bring the text back ;)

Add Custom Cell Borders

To emphasize the rows, let's copy the original and add row borders between the rows. But not the top, bottom or side borders.

Highlight the six rows of data and then go to the Borders menu in the toolbar.

Set the border color to white and select the "Horizontal borders" option:

Finishing Touches

Add these finishing touches to complete the table:

• Switch off the gridlines (View > Show > Gridlines)
• Center-align the rank, country, wins and losses columns
• Make the team names bold
• Adjust the width of the columns to suit
• Adjust the height of the rows to give the data more room
• From the toolbar, choose to center the data vertically:

And voila!

Our finished design looks like this:

I hope there are some interesting and useful techniques in this email that you can apply to your own Google Sheets.

And I encourage you to be inspired by something around you, perhaps totally unrelated to your work.

What design elements (think colors, fonts, spacing, images) can you borrow to visually augment your Sheets?

If you enjoyed this newsletter, please forward it to a friend who might enjoy it.

Have a great week!

Cheers,
Ben

P.S. Sticking with the weather theme, these clouds will make you smile​