Roasting Google Sheets
Just dropped a new video on YouTube.com/BetterSheets
In this video I breakdown what's working and what can be improved on sheets out in the public.
Full Transcript
[00:00:00] Introduction
Well, good morning today is a really fun day or morning because I am roasting Google sheets. I literally have just made, a cup of coffee. We're gonna get through this whole coffee and we're gonna get through a bunch of Google sheets. I'm gonna review. Give a couple of hints on how they can make them better.
And you'll learn along with me about these really cool sheets. We got recipes, mortgages sales tax. All of this is actually really fun. I'm gonna take a sip. We're gonna get cracking or no, we're gonna get roasting.
[00:00:40] Recipe Sheet
Ooh, this one is so delicious. This is from sidekick. This is Rachel who runs sidekick. I think she produced this sheet. This is a list of recipes and the tabs are breakfast, lunch, dinner, appetizers, desserts drinks, vegetarian vegan, 30 minutes or less.
Healthyish and then reader's. It's not just a choice, it's actually readers submissions. I don't think there are any yet the last time I checked yet. So I wonder if we can like help fix that right away, the simplicity here is really good. There is just like one glaring issue with it that I, I can fix really quickly and I can show you what's up.
When using this kind of sheet, right. We, we want to have like the name identity. We wanna have that all, but then when someone uses it, as you can see here I'm, I can only see two recipes at a time scrolling. It it's really hard actually, oddly hard. So let's fix that and really the fixes this, you can do it two different ways.
One, you can move all of this intro. Like this is a really important. Entry into this. So maybe making an intro tab and, and really beautifying and making that one like a one pager with just this information, you can do that, but there's one other thing, like, I understand if you want to not have like an intro and then a bunch of pages that might be.
different than what you want to do. So you might want it on this page. So how you do that is this line, the red, the headline header you put on Rob one, and then you freeze that and all of this, you put underneath it. And so as someone scrolls through it, the, the intro and the header goes away. This I think is a really good improvement.
For usability, but if you're making like a free Google sheet and you want that to lead to something else or you want your branding very clearly on there all the time, then my solution is not going to do that. It's gonna be like better for use not better for branding, but there is one thing I would suggest they do to this.
And it is that this header sidekick doesn't show up on any of the other tabs. I was actually surprised at that. I think having a couple photos at the top of each of these tabs, probably didn't want to do it because it did decrease usability. So now I'll show you how to. And then I think it would be really cool to have a different photo of different recipes on each one, like a lunch photo, a dinner photo of appetizers so that the user know that they're on a different tab.
I know it's really silly to think, like, how do you not know you're on a different tab, but these tabs down here is the only way you'll know. And because the design is the same on every single. So you just wanna change one element, which could be a photo and I'll, I'll show you that in one second. All right.
So I made a copy of the sheet. The last images are coming through now. The only thing I'm gonna do here to show you what's up is first. We're going to go to file no view. We're gonna unfreeze row six.
Alright. We've UN frozen row six and we're just gonna move row six up to row. okay. Now we have it on row one. Now we're going to freeze row one.
And now we have the header here. We have the intro again. I would just recommend a Def different tab for this kind of thing, cuz we want to like really focus on it. And we want that to be one of the first things that people see when they come here because we want, we want shares. We want submissions that's I think a really important part that we can go into deeper if you want to do a longer video.
And I go into it a lot along better sheets videos, but now as we scroll down, we have exactly the same sheet, except it's much more readable. We can see more, we can read more, we can make it even a little bit more readable by changing the font a little bit by making font a little different or set up a little.
And also this sidekick pictures could change on. You could add them to each of these change them for the different brandings of lunch, dinner, appetizers. And I think this makes it a much better sheet. So yeah. I think this offers it an O I think if this offers the sheet maker an opportunity to add in like their subscribe link, a lot more places on every single sheet.
You can also, one thing I noticed is as you scroll down, like you sort of. Miss the branding. So I would actually insert into maybe every 10 lines, 20 lines, like, Hey, so remind yourself, like subscribe to the site, kick like, or you are a subscriber share it. I would do different things each time. Like share this on Twitter, share it on LinkedIn very many times.
If you create a free sheet and you want people to share it, you'll have like share up Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, all Al. But a list like this inserting promos into every 10, 20 lines gives you the opportunity to focus on one. So you can create a Twitter intent link and create a LinkedIn intent link. You can create a share by email link.
If you want to, you can use URL to link gen directly to their Gmail and open a Gmail and be like, Write the subject for them. And I would focus on one each time because you have such a great list. Rachel, you have such a great amount of tabs here, and you're gonna get more readers choice stuff. Like I think you have great opportunity.
Like you could put two share promotions in between each of, on this page. On the next page. You could probably put another couple and focus on like sharing this recipe on Twitter. One other thing I, I just thought of is putting over here on column E a Twitter intent of like share this recipe. I sell a list of 100 Twitter.
Formats. And on that sheet is a Twitter intent link. The Twitter intent link is pretty simple to create in a Google sheet. It's a URL that you just take the text and put it in the one text area of the URL. Pretty simple. And I think that would add, I think people would love that because they wanna talk about these recipes.
They want to share them. But also. Think about Twitter. Think about Gmail. If we're sharing recipes. So many recipes are shared one to one like, oh, I know my, my grandma's gonna wanna do this. Or my aunt or my niece or nephew is want to, needs to make this. That's also something interesting. Twitter might not be the exact greatest opportunity.
I think maybe Gmail might be this is exciting. This is a really cool sheet. I really like it. Like.
[00:07:05] 363 VC Questions
All right here, we got a pretty darn simple and sweet sheet here with fund. So fund made a lead magnet that is 363 questions at feces investors. Ask startup founders. Now the keyword here is curated. Okay. So their claim is that it is a curated list of 363. questions. What they really did was it's, it's a 363 copy and pasted questions.
And you can see the source here. So they've curated slash copy and pasted from Forbes from early growth from Benjamin LIBOR. That's a lot of Benjamin has a lot of questions. Startup hacks has a lot of questions. All business has a lot of questions. So. A lot of different sources or not, not a lot of different sources, mind you, that is a few sources and copy pasted directly from there.
So two things I would like to see in this sheet that I think could make it better. One, it is darn right simple. And if you are trying to put out a lead magnet, if you're trying to put out something free in a Google sheet that is going to then. get you more interest or engagement or help. You're really, it's gonna like, it needs to help your audience.
Right. And funding did a really funky little thing here that I haven't seen before. And I like it. It's they've copy and pasted their branding over here on the left. And, and now it's not a banner at the top. I would've said like put a banner at the top and then exactly. As I said on another sheet, it Freeze this question header, and then right under it, put your branding. And then as people scroll up, that branding goes away, but they wanted their branding all over the place. I think this is really good. If you are interested in getting screenshots of your lead magnet onto Twitter, onto Facebook, onto Reddit, these kinds of things.
One thing I'd like to see is I think it would work better though, sort of every 10th, 20th. 30th. If you put a little black bar that says this is curated by funding, like instead of a large one have like a nice thing there, maybe make it so it's screenshot and always has your branding in there. I would really make this crowdsourced.
One of the absolute best things about Google sheets is the ability to bring in a lot of validated data sort of formatted data into a place. So looking at these questions and, and I'm gonna, I'm gonna offer a couple suggestions about crowdsourcing in a couple different ways. One is yes. The immediate thing you think about.
Let's just get questions from startups. Like what are the actual questions that startup founders got? What these are, are curated from curations. And so we're sort of a little bit abstracted or aggregated a way it's a sort of an aggregation of 300 of questions that VC's ask startup founders. What I would like to see.
Is one, yeah, some submission, like talk to us, engage with us, right? A lead magnet should offer you like a chance to help someone. And then whoever gets help the most will end up signing up and, and you get a better relationship, but you can also make the lead magnet itself engaging. And people wanna like help that and, and really make the community come in and, and add to it.
So the first thing you would think is just get submissions, get, what have you been asked? What are some questions that you've been asked? Here's the second thing that I think could be added to this is a little up vote system. A way to say, like, do, did you get asked this question? Yes or no? And a, yes would be like an up vote and a no would be not a down vote, but like a, maybe it's just like, have you been asked this question, click here?
And what you could do is you can add click tracking. I've actually made click tracking. Available in Google sheets it ENCO, it encompasses creating one sheet where you have all of the, the like link small link and then a large link. And then there's a web app you can create in Google script.
And I give away that code. I have a video called ad click tracking to. add, click tracking to your Google sheets. And I give away the sheet that you can copy and paste and get that script and add click tracking. So what you can do with click tracking is, you know, how many times that cl that button has been clicked, then put that in the sheet, be like, okay, Take all of these questions, here's the list.
But then on AE list, sort them by the number of clicks and have the click be, Hey, have you been asked this question yet? If yes. Click here. And so you could create an up vote system inside of Google sheets. And then this becomes, I wouldn't say it's like a product hunt for questions, but I would say like, it's an aggregation of here's all the questions we think people get asked, but then we've now asked the community and here's what they actually get asked.
One thing is, well, I think maybe this is on funding and maybe this is a, or a second sheet that you might wanna add is what are the best answers? What are great examples of answers? This sheet is really simple and I really like it for that. Like it, it ask these questions and doesn't give the answer.
It's like, you should have this answer. You should know it. One, here's a crazy thing that she could do. Sort of like a plug and play. Like if, if there was an answer that is Sort of a format that say here's how you should format your answer. And then in that format, you, you say like, okay, here's your startup name?
Here's your market, here's your opportunity? You could create a plug-in play system, like, Hey, answer these 10 questions. And now you have these hundred questions already answered and here's the format. I think that would be cool. I've created another sheet, another sheet called headline generator based on headlines and.
Actually based on headline. So headline is like an AI headline generator. I made a Google sheet based on that. And it doesn't do all the functions that headline does, but it shows you an opportunity of like, here's how you can create like take 10 answers, like simple, like little short answers, and then create like a hundred actual answers to real questions.
Like. Market opportunity is one part of like the total rate of growth and possible growth and projected growth. So I think that's a really cool thing we could. But I really like this sheet. I like the simplicity. I think that, I think the last thing I would say the last thing I would say that you must change is the font.
You have a really cool font here fund in really nice here, but like Ariel is just, I don't know. I, I don't like it so much. You just gotta just change it to something, something else. And that's my rose to funding curated list of 363 questions that HECS and investors ask. Like.
[00:13:46] Channel Cost Calculator
All right. Rob from hotel, PPC has given me access to this channel cost calculator and he wants it roasted. We got the coffee roasted. Now we get this sheet roasted. All right. This is interesting right away, like the immediate reaction I have is. Two things. One, I have no idea what to do as a user, if, if I was just given this though, so there might be some like email along with this, or maybe there was like an intro paragraph on like how, how did I get this?
I don't know. In any case, even if you have like an email I intro and say, here's how you use this ear, here's how to use this calculator. Or even have a landing page to then say, Hey, go get this Google sheet. I would highly recommend. You put the instructions also inside of the sheet, because you don't know how people are sharing this.
You don't know how they're accessing it. And you just wanna help people. Like the whole idea is to be helpful. Right. And useful. So put the instructions right here. I wouldn't add any the, on the calculator itself. I wouldn't have any. Extra words or any extra instructions. I put all the instructions on a tab before.
The second thing that I see immediately is the, the coloring, the, the branding and the coloring one. There is no branding. I checked out your site PPC. Here it is PPC for hotels.com affordable hotel PPC agency. Great. So. What I see here is like a big, beautiful image, not beautiful, but like an image background.
I see a red button up there white font. When I go to the about page it is white up there then dark. And then it's a dark background with this. Here's here's a first photo of people. I see. Rob, here's your name right here, Rob hating. I might be pronouncing that wrong. Put your photo on a big smiling photo.
I like this agency is you. You are this agency. Rob is PPC PPC for hotels is Rob. Sorry. Rob is PPC for hotels. Hotel PPC for hotels is Rob give your face. You're selling yourself. You're selling yourself. That sounds bad. That's actually really good. Put and then put your face here. So let me make a file.
Copy. and make sure you have a button that says, like, get a copy of this inside of the sheet. So we're roasting. Let's do roast click. Okay. Okay. So right away, I think, I think I would, especially if the name is at the top here on the file, I would take this out and I would make it like a nice thing on another, on another tab, like a nice intro.
Okay. Cool. So I would take off the name and text put branding on here, right? If you have a logo, if you have your face, I'd keep it here. Maybe make a, like a upper corner of it. But we can, this gives us more room to play here. Gives us more room to the text is a little bit small. It's Calibri.
Great. Not, not aerial. That's awesome. It is 11. I would make it a little bit bigger, especially cuz it's not too long of a calculator. Right. Let's just see what happens if we increase the font size to 14. Not one for, oh my God. Wow. This that's much easier to read much, much, much easier to read. Do that again.
Great. These boxes. So one, one thing I see here is there's this arrow essentially is text arrow. That's pointing to this box. If we make the design good enough, useful enough, we don't need extra elements to. Two things. I think what this is doing this, I think what this arrow is doing is trying to get your eye, go from search volume over to here.
Well, we can do that just by aligning these to the right and in design, right? There's a one principle that like proximity, proximity equals relation. So we can do something like just change the alignment.
Okay. We've got the alignment and this space here or this area in between we can just delete that. Let's see what happens. We delete it. Just look at this design, right.
and now there is no way that someone reading this, looking at this would not understand that search volume is this box. The only thing we don't understand, like if, if I didn't have any instructions, I wouldn't know what number to put in here. Is this search volume of a keyword and that is really good for another page, right?
You can also put notes here, put comments. You can make it so that a sheet co copies the comments, I think. But I think just having like a nice layout of instructions on like, here's what each of these means you can link back to that if you want or where to get this number from, this is a user inputted number.
This is really good. Okay. Mm, double claps for you. Double snaps for you. Conversion rate is not an entered number. A dropdown list. That's really good. Because if we have too many fields and calcula, this happens so often on calculators, we have so many fields and we expect the user to know exactly what to do, and we don't have any validation at all.
And so a user is gonna mess up. Like 90% of the time, unless they know exactly what we know they're gonna mess up. So having a dropdown menu, having options for people is really, really good. This commission rate could also have a dropdown, different, different things. Average booking revenue. This needs to be formatted as dollars.
I think cost for click as well dollars and I see dollars and dollars. So you just need a little bit of formatting there to really punch in. This is money. We're talking about money. We're making. Here's clicks, transactions, cost per sale. Here's something I would one reason as well that I would delete all the stuff at the top.
And let's just see if we can delete this row. Rose delete roses. There we go. Now we should be able to get everything within one view port. Is that everything? Yes. Except for the branding. Let's get that in. Cause we might put that branding at the top instead. Let's just delete that row. One more row.
Come on, come on. Oh, we need one more. So I think there's two rows here and we can delete this row. Let's get it. Let's get it. Let's get it in there. Oh, almost, almost. We're so close, delete more, more row. And yes, this gives us less space, right. But we can change the font a little. You can change. I think this is at 14.
Now you can increase the row size. Oh, that's one thing you have rows in between these and that's good because you have these boxes. Sometimes though you might want to collapse that a little bit and make those six things really like tight. If you want to display this extra information and really the use of a calculator is not inputting right.
the amount we, we care about the output. So you want to, and we also care about the relation between the input and the output, right? We want to do away with the work I calculate does away with the busy work, but shows us this input gets this output. So I would redesign this. I would like ask a bunch of questions, like what really matters here right now.
I just see that this channel costs is 11. obviously I'm, I'm not a PPC person. I don't know what 11% means. I don't know if that that's good or bad having green. And I, and I say this a lot. I like put green as your like end result. But like if a user is using this You might want to change red and green for like positive or profitable green and, and negative for red.
And so really you might want a different color here. Again, you got some interesting colors in your logo. You have all of the primary colors I can see here. Blue, red, yellow, green on your page, you have different. Designs like different color choices. I would bring these color choices into here. If this is for a user, if this is for a user that you really wanna match your experience on your website and experience with how you like your logo, you want it here.
You want your experience to match perfectly. You don't want PE you don't want people to think. is this a Google sheet for where is this Google sheet from? And yes, you have this text PPC for hotels, but your, the colors that you use, the font should match to. And, and I think this should, I think this got really good places to go.
You gotta put those instructions on. I love that these are blue. Yeah. That's one thing I do recommend is putting blue. It's like bright blue that like no one ever uses any logo. That's never used that's for user input. The only thing you gotta do is tell people that that's what it means. Not with a key, but with like an instruction, be like, Hey, by the way, everywhere you see that there's a blue outline.
That's for user input. Say that like explicitly say that in instructions. Give your face. Oh man. I, I would be, I, I really wanna know more about this and more how it. Because I think this, this has got potential here. I like all these, you have more output. This is good. You have more output than input.
So you have six things of input and you have 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9 things of output that is really good for calculator. That means we're getting more out of it, then we're putting into it. Yeah. Instructions on what exactly number should I put in what type of number validation you can put validation on each of these?
Where like, if you put in a, some non number it will scream at you.
That that would be really cool too. All right. Hopefully this is helpful.
[00:23:14] Mortgage Calculator
We are almost done with our coffee. So this next sheet is mortgage calculator for Google sheets. It's by Alejandro. It is available right now on gum road. Alejandro is here and it is available for free, I think, or name a fair price. Not free you name a price. Go get it. It's four calculators in one.
So Alejandro. Here's your roast? The roasted beans are almost done. And it's really cool. So I really like the design of this. I think it's funky. I think it really screams. Like I'm not a Google sheet, even though I am the color, it really reads nicely. I think you could even increase the font a little bit right away.
This text here is. How many is that one sentence I make it, like, I don't know, bullet points or something. It was hard to read right away. But also I wonder like a user is getting this after they bought it or bought it on gum road. So I really like that you repeat like all of the use cases here and have the different calculators click links.
I show this in my guide to make. Making Google sheets for fun and profit. This is a really cool thing. You can create internal Google sheet links that link over. Let's see how it works. If it works. my internet is so slow. There it goes. Great. So we're on the first one month. What's the monthly payment.
So now here's something I was playing with this a little bit before. How is this different than just, I literally went to Google and I type calculate mortgage payment. And here's a calculator on Google itself. If I don't need to get a Google sheet, I don't need to go to your sheet. I can just type in the mortgage amount interest rate period.
And here's my payment. Let's add a zero and let's, let's compare. Let's see if this actually. Is do these numbers come up the same. So price is 1 million down payment, 200,000, 30 years, 2.5%. Let's go do that. So I have 1 million mortgage, 30 years, 2.5 and 3 9 5 1, but I have no place here to put in down payment.
That's interesting. That is interesting. So I do have in this Google sheet, the ability to put in a down payment. So let's just say this is zero for now. So that's three, one. Oh, Nope. It's not it's floating. give it some time. Give it some time damn nice. 3, 9, 5, 1. That loading time makes it feel like this really matters.
Like that's funny. And if it worked immediately, I would like, oh, I could just keep changing. But like, now that it like took a little time, like, okay, let me think about it a little. Okay. 3 9, 5, 1 20 cents 3 9, 5, 1 damn straight on bang. Okay. That's a simple. , in this sheet you can add that you have a down payment.
It's really cool. I would want to see, like, how does, so I, I, I click here, right? I'm just adding to 20,000 and it loads. I wonder if you could create, is this here? The mortgage comparison? Is this the answer? I wonder if I want to compare, like, what is the difference?
Yes. Oh, this is good. So how do different mortgages compare against each other? What is the ultimate price I'll pay? , if I change my down payment, keep the home price the same. Keep the principal, keep the loan years the same and just change the down payment. I can do that here. That's cool. That's really cool.
So I would be here's my monthly payment. Here's how it's gonna change. Here's how the total interest paid. I would add in here. The total amount. So if I want a $500,000 home, what is the total amount I'll pay? Not just so it'd be interest plus the payment interest paid plus principle, right? So five.
So that would be, or down payment plus principle plus total interest paid would be what's the total amount I'm paying. Show me that I would also say if you know that people are gonna be compar. do the comparison for them actually like, okay, so you have this sheet, I would add another sheet, a fifth calculator and say, compare a versus B.
So take these like this list and then create drop down that you can choose these here. That would be really cool. And then you can say, compare a to B and C the actual difference. If I'm changing my down payment. To I want to double my down payment. Total interest paid is gonna be different. Right.
It's only changing my total interest by $6,000. It looks like really? That's it. So I, if, if I pay an extra one, if I double my down payment right now, same home price, same interest. Nope. It's not the same interest rate. Oh my God. loan year two. Let's do two. Okay. That's interest. Save $20,000. That's really good.
Okay. That's good to know. Right. If I double my down payment, I'm gonna save, I'm really saving 20,000. So I'm actually paying more now, but really only like 80 K more like, cuz I'm gonna save that 20. I'm never gonna have to pay that 20 K extra. So I'm, it's really like 80 K more to get a lower and then also a lower monthly payment by 600 bucks.
man, 600 bucks. I think that this is gonna be around 20. Yeah, 18 K. There we go. that's where you save the money. But like what if I only do one 20? See, so an extra 20,000 will save me 4,000. Great, nice. This is really cool. Let's see the home price calculator. oh, I really like the back to dashboard button.
That's good. That's good. One thing I would say is make it much clearer that make it much clearer. What is an input and what is an output? Actually make this a different color and then say, Hey, wherever you see this color, put in your number and that's always an extra thing, right. There, there could, there should be some stylistic change, like a border because some people are colorblind.
Also some people have different screens, like I do a lot of work without the blue light as if it's like nighttime mode. So I won't see certain colors or just, or certain shades of colors and certain differences. So you'll wanna like, do different primary colors or, but also block it off, like put a nice little border on it and be like, anytime you see this, see this color, see this border.
That's where you put in your information also around calculators. I think a normal calculator is that you have a number of inputs, like say we're doing addition, simple calculator number one, number two. Add those together, you get a num a third number, right? One plus two equals three. And so we're having more inputs than outputs.
We have one output from a number of inputs, I would say to really feel like there's a extra value here to feel like we're getting something that's mind boggling and really good and like shareable, right? Like you want more outputs than inputs. So right now or more ways to change the, the numbers or to see comparisons, right?
Comparison is good. We wanna see more than one comparison. We want, we don't want just the Delta. We want Delta. We want like maybe, okay, so here's one way. So you have a mortgage comparison where all the inputs are, are compared to each. what you can do as well is say, input this number one, 1 million, this number, the price put in the down payment.
We already calculate your loan principle. Great. That's one output. We, we know what your monthly payment is. That's two outputs. But we have four inputs, right? We have 30 year loan a or, and an interest rate. So we have four inputs and we have two outputs right now. Two more out outputs could be take this number 30.
And if you know that it's going to be like increments of five, do the math and create a, another calculator. So this calculate very good call it like the simple monthly payment, create another one and say we're gonna extrapolate based on your number. So actually put in 34 someone. So the only thing someone needs to put in is 1 million put in the down payment, maybe put in the mortgage interest rate, maybe , but we're gonna extract, we're gonna show you all of these numbers, thirty, twenty five, twenty fifteen, ten five show just across the graph, put in those numbers for them and get the result.
So it's a graph of their monthly payments. So show that graph. Same as the 2.5% do it like increments of 0.2, 5% subtract, subtract, and you can do that easily by adding, I think I made a copy of this already. You can add a column. Let's do that. Ah, it's, it's locked, it's locked. All right. A, you know what I'm talking about, add a column and then just do, don't put in this number again, 1,000,020 or 200,000.
Keep those as two inputs and then get those outputs across then. What's going on is you have two inputs and then you will have at least. five, maybe 10 outputs you'll have the loan principle. You'll have the monthly payment, but you'll have the monthly payment with differing number of years with different number of mortgage rates, then combine those and do those in different ways.
So you might have 12 different outputs, but that would be a really cool step up. Right? Get this simple one. Done. You have it here. Add another one. It's like, Hey, do you wanna see a graph of all of these possibilities? Oh, that would be really cool. All right. I think that's I think that's enough. Make sure I'm gonna do an outro now.
This will be edited later, but make sure you take a look at the mortgage calculator that Aandra's building on gum road. Name, your price, name a price. Get a copy of the spreadsheet, right?
[00:33:06] Sales Tax Calculator
you would not think that I would enjoy sales tax calculators. I, no one enjoys sales tax calculators, but when it's in a Google sheet, it's really exciting. And this one has a lot of really fun things that I, I can recommend to you to check out, to, to change. One is you have instructions here on the right, so let's go through the sales tax calculator.
Here's the actual sales tax calculator, right? It's essentially six lines. We have make a copy. We have common tax rates and we have an introduction and a key. Okay, great. Instructions. I would absolutely put on a separate tab because in this case in particular your information is nicely compacted into one right here, and you're adding this like, I guess invisible border, right?
A no man land or no data land here and then have instructions. What I would do is I would put this on a separate tab and I would have screenshots inside of that tab and said, okay. And, and, and make little, just take a screenshot and then draw on like Adobe, premier, not premier preview, like at a PDF reader, draw little lines.
That point, like, step one, step two, step three. On these like screen. And, and show it or make a loom video. Loom videos are really simple to make. You can make free ones. loo.com is available for free. For I think a hundred videos for up to five minutes. If your instructions are less, are more than five minutes, break it into parts, break it into sections.
And say like, step one, do this and it should be 30 seconds. Step two, do this 30 seconds. Step three, do this 30 seconds. And then. What I've really done in a lot of sheets where I have those kinds of loom videos is you can keep adding to that. As questions come up as a frequently asked questions, you can keep adding to those instructions.
Let me make a copy of this. Cuz I have two more suggestions. And one of them is about this file. Make a copy link. So you file make a copy. You have this button here and it copies it, right? So if I click that button, this is what shows. Not a, not a blank page, let it lower it a little bit. It's it's Google's copy document page, which is super terrible.
like, this is, this is a simple, like, just make a copy page, but there is a really fun thing you can do, and it takes two seconds up here in the URL. At the end, let's go to the end of the URL. Instead of copy. What we can do is write, we're gonna delete copy template and then slash preview. And what this does, I'll show you is, takes your sheet and shows it, and then has a use template button over there, right there.
So this gives people a view into the sheet once they have access to it and they, and they want. Let 'em know what they're copying. This could also be like a security issue. Like if you want to make sure people know what they're copying, see like, bam right here, this is much better experience than that copy text experience.
So I would say change that link to that. We'll use this.
All right. So we made a copy. In here, I would just say, click here, make a co, make a copy click here. Let's go there. See what that URL is. So really this is like a really simple fix here. We're just going to go to this URL and. Just enter a delete copy and put template preview. There we go. But I would also put this, this button, I would make a button in better sheets.
I talk about all the time making really cool looking buttons, design. I'm not gonna go into that now, cuz it takes like a few more minutes than we have. But I would put this on a separate tab.
All right. So now that we have the start here, sales, sex calculator, instructions. And we have the file. Make a copy here. We can go and delete that from the other tab.
All right. I discovered a secret and I will fix that secret. So this D three is a list of a range, but it's only inclusive and exclusive. So you have the data validation and it's a list of a range, but we can just make that a list of items. I don't know. Inclusive, well, inclusive ex inclusive. Okay.
Save. And that's the, that'll be the same thing there. Now we can delete delete this And everything's fine. Yeah. So, oh, Nope, it's fine. Okay. There is a little bit of an Easter egg here and it's really fun. It's really cool. So if I change exclusive and inclusive, so now there's two items there to inclusive.
We get this. So I don't know what's exactly happening. I didn't read the instructions properly, but I think this is a cleaner look at least and and gives you the opportunity to do more. Which one last thing I would do is the text AER is like the basic, the, the, the bare bones, what you can do if you want an interesting option, I would change the text to consol console, us cons console, us console us.
And this seems a little more calculator X, like this is sales X calculator. I would add, I would make the text like that. I would also change the size right now. I think it's default 10. It gets really difficult for users to see. Numbers that small for, oh, there's a certain population for which even 10, 11 or 12 font is hard to read on a computer screen.
And you know, something like 25% of all Americans have some disability with and that includes like color blindness. That includes. Eyeglasses like people with eyeglasses, like myself, have a hard time seeing tiny font on screens. So you wanna be a little more inclusive and try to increase the size of text, especially when you have the room and opportunity to do so.
I would suggest at least the 14, if not if you can do more, do more like 16 especially if it's a simple few things and they can all fit within the view port There are different types of view ports. Like if someone's using this on mobile, you might wanna look at that. And, and take a look as is the font size wrong for mobile.
And there might be a good fit down to like 14 or 15, but 16, I think for this is like a really good one. And then for headers, so I have a, a, a tough time thinking that this is good to have sales, sex ator here. When you have. the name of the whole sheet is sales tax calculator. Just one more text you can make, look really simple simplify, minimize the view, what people see the key you can also put as down more, or keep it in the view.
Port, if it looks nice, if this one looks nice, this is like one of the coolest ones I love that this inputs is in yellow and this outputs is in orange. Really like that. That's really cute. And you can, you can keep going with that, you know, change up different fonts. I would say Kota here is a good next step.
There are so many options here, but let's look at what comfortaa looks like. comfortaa I don't know how to pronounce that. Let's go with Comfortaa. Yeah, I think that looks fine. And maybe like a 15 There you go. And yeah, it doesn't necessarily look like Google sheet, but like, why are, why do we have to look like the default Google sheets?
We don't have to, this is, this is better sheet, baby. All right. Thanks for watching. Bye.
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