Basic Formatting in Excel - Report Making

Making a great report is like being a good boyfriend - you have to get lots of small things right! You have to get the numbers to the right decimal places, use colours to highlight important rows, create borders, hide unimportant columns etc.

In this segment, you will learn the basics of making a good report - hiding or deleting unimportant columns, freezing rows or columns for better readability, getting numbers in readable formats etc. In the process, you will also learn ways to use shortcuts so that you can save time. 

Note: From this segment onwards, we recommend you to create a report using the hospital charges dataset as you watch the lectures. Also, experiment with the various formatting options. 

You may have noted that small things like hiding irrelevant information, getting the right widths of columns etc. make a huge difference in the readability of the report. Next, you will learn number formatting which is basically a way to get the numbers in the right units and to the correct number of decimals. Also, pay attention to the shortcuts being mentioned and try to get habitual to them. 

Getting numbers in the right formats and units makes the analysis easier and reduces the chances of mistakes when reading the data. Note that a lot of formatting operations we have discussed are not only aimed at improving readability but also to reduce the amount of time spent on reading the file. Hiding columns, formatting numbers, using shortcuts etc. are all ways to improve both readability and efficiency. 

Another commonly used operation used for the same purpose is freezing panes, which you'll learn next.

To summarise, you learnt some tasks that make a report readable - hiding or deleting data, number formats, freezing panes etc. A few things worth remembering are:

• You should only delete data when you are sure that you will never need them, else you should just hide them
• To freeze rows and columns apart from the first row /column, choose the first cell inside the table formed by the rows and columns to be frozen  

Having learnt basic formatting, this is only the tip of the iceberg. In the next segment, you will learn conditional formatting which is a critical ingredient in making excellent reports.