Format at the Worksheet Level
Learning Objectives
After completing this unit, you’ll be able to:
- Rotate the header labels on your worksheet.
- Change the border and divider and shading settings on your worksheet.
- Resize the headers and cells on your worksheet.
- Format the lines on your worksheet.
After you have all the formatting at the workbook level applied, click into a worksheet to customize how you want your visualization to look. At the worksheet level, you can format elements such as the alignment of your header labels, the borders, dividers, and shading on your tables, the size of your headers and cells, and the lines used to aid visual analysis.
Rotate Header Labels on Your Worksheet
Header labels are horizontal (left-to-right) by default. If you'd like them to align vertically (up-and-down) instead, right-click (control-click on Mac) any header and select Rotate Label.
Here are examples of a viz with horizontal labels (left) and a viz with vertical labels (right).
Resize Headers and Cells
You can resize the widths or heights of row and column headers or axes by manually dragging them to your desired size.
- When you hover your cursor over the vertical or horizontal border of a header or axis, the resize cursor
appears. - Click and drag the border left and right or up and down.
When you manually resize one row header, all row headers resize.
You can also change the view from Standard to Fit Width, Fit Height, or fill the Entire View. You can format the cell size to be Taller, Shorter, Wider, Narrower, Bigger, or Smaller.
Expand the menu on the fit icon
in the toolbar to access these options.
To clear manual sizing, right-click (control-click on Mac) anywhere on the viz to open the context menu and select Clear Manual Sizing.
Format Borders, Dividers, and Shading Settings on Your Worksheet
Row and column dividers serve to visually break up a view and are most commonly used in nested text tables. You can modify the style, width, color, and level of the borders that divide each row or each column using the row and column divider dropdowns.
Shading settings control the background color of the worksheet, pane, and headers.
Borders and Dividers
Borders are the lines that surround the table, pane, and headers in a view. You can format the border style, width, and color for the pane and header areas. You can also format the row and column dividers, which are the lines on the inside of the table, pane, and headers.
In this example, the Row Dividers are formatted to use a blue color.
By default, the Pane and Header dividers are linked to allow simultaneous formatting and save you time. If you'd like the pane and the headers to have different formatting, click the link icon to unlink them and format each element separately.
You can also switch the formatting settings for Row and Column Dividers on or off to hide styling options you don't want to use.
In this example, Row Dividers formatting is turned off, and the Column Dividers pane and header formatting is unlinked.
Row and Column Divider Level Settings
The level refers to the header level you want to use to divide your rows. For example, if you have two fields on your measures column, such as category and subcategory, you can choose to have row dividers just by category (level 1) or by category and subcategory (level 2).
In this example viz, the row divider is set at level 1, so the divider lines appear between each category, but not between each subcategory.
In this example viz, the row divider is set at level 2, so the divider lines appear between each category and each subcategory.
Shading
You can format the background color of the worksheet, pane, and headers by changing the default settings under Shading.
To access the shading settings, go to Format, then select Worksheet and Shading.
Format the Lines on Your Worksheet
You can control the appearance of the lines that are part of the view, such as grid lines and zero lines. You can turn the lines on or off and format the line type (for example, solid, dotted, or dashed) and the thickness of the lines. You can also format the color and the opacity of the lines.
For example, you can turn on grid lines to help give quantitative cues to the viewer. In this example, gray dotted grid lines have been added to the viz.
You can also format trend lines, reference lines, and reference bands on the web. You can access these formatting settings by clicking the line while the format pane is open, or by clicking the tooltip on the line and then selecting Format. In this example, the trend line has been formatted to be a dotted orange line.
You learned how to apply formatting at the workbook and the worksheet level. Learn how to apply formatting to individual elements in the next unit.