Excel is your most overlooked design tool

A designer’s perspective on the world’s #1 spreadsheet tool — how to build infographics, dashboards, presentations & more

These are built in Excel. Examples selected from the Excel Dashboard Toolkit and the free Excel Template Newsletter

People have a lot of misconceptions about Excel. Many people think it’s nothing but a spreadsheet tool for tackling the occasional budget. Or that it’s great for processing data but you need a separate tool like PowerPoint to display it nicely.

Those misconceptions limit how we use Excel.

But Excel can do so much more and all it takes is understanding a few lesser-known features. I’m going to show you those features and explain some of the new and unusual ways you can use Excel.

The features

• shapes — learn to properly leverage shapes
• pictures — images can make a big impact on your sheet’s look and feel
• icons — an easy way to give that modern web UI style
• text and colors— go beyond the default style and palettes
• chart styles — match your charts to your color palette

Want a quick 5 minute walkthrough? Here it is:

Shapes:

Excel has a set of shape features that are very similar to PowerPoint. Those shapes can be combined, stacked, and styled to create the same visual styles that you would build for your slide deck.

There is a large set of pre-built shapes and the option to create freeform shapes as well.

There are two important things you need to know about shapes:

1. They can be layered. In other words, you can stack shapes on top of each other to create more complex effects. To move a shape forward or back you can right click the shape and select “bring to front” or “bring to back”
2. They have a lot of customization options including: fills, outlines, shadows, reflections, glow effects, 3D formats and more.

The fill effects are the key to making designs that look less like Excel and more like a powerpoint or custom dashboard.

I use a few different fills to create unique and interesting effects.

Gradients: you can fill a rectangle with a gradient to create shadows and depth:

Images: you can mask an image to fit a shape by using “Picture or texture fill” for a shape.

Text: create a fully transparent shape and add a cell reference to include dynamic text inside that shape. You can move that text freely around your page. This gives you far more flexibility than trying to enter text directly into a cell on your table.

Pictures

For some reason people seem to always skip adding imagery to their Excel workbooks. I’m not sure why. Maybe people don’t want to distract from the underlying data. But when we use an app like powerpoint we use images far more freely. Images don’t need to be a distraction, they can actually help strengthen the impact of your data.

I gently encourage people to start thinking about how to add pictures into their sheets.

In the example above, the sheet was referencing a specific piece of real estate so I included an image from inside the home. It gives context, makes the sheet feel customized and makes the whole report feel far more visually engaging.

Icons

This section is short and sweet. Excel has a free icon set that people rarely notice.

Under the ‘Insert’ tab there is an option titled “Icons”. This button lets you access the set of free icons and stock images.

Text and Colors

Apps like Excel have a standard set of colors and fonts that are selected by default for all users. Those standard colors are fine. They get the job done. But there’s one issue — so many people use them that they are easily recognizable and every report looks vaguely similar.

The simple solution is to use your own color palette and test out different fonts.

Color palette selection:

I’ve written about this in depth in my other posts but there are a few ways to tackle your color selection:

1. Ask a designer on your team if you have a style guide/brand guide. They typically include a set of colors that you can use.
2. Copy the colors from your logo/website/PPT decks. If you have a professionally designed version of any of these, then they will probably include a nice set of colors you can borrow and use in your Excel workbook.
3. Use a color palette tool like the Adobe Color Picker

Font selection:

I’m going to keep this simple. Font choice can be very complex but you can follow a few basic guidelines and still do a great job.

1. Fonts should be easily readable, avoid overly stylistic fonts like ‘papyrus’ or ‘comic sans’ or fonts that are difficult to read
2. Keep your fonts consistent. Keep all your titles in the same font, size and color. Do the same for your subheadings and paragraph text.
3. Don’t use more than 2–3 fonts in one report — if you do choose to use more than one font, make sure they don’t look too similar. The only reason to use more than one font is to have contrast between different types of text.
4. Use font colors that contrast with the background. If you have a dark background use a light font. If you have a light background use a dark font.
5. Don’t forget to change your chart fonts. If you insert a bar/line/pie chart, remember to update the font on the labels/axes

Chart styles

The default colors and layout of chart in Excel will rarely (if ever) match your design.

You need adjust your fonts, series colors, labels, axes, titles, etc. to make it fit. I’ll go through each step I used in this example — the process will be similar for most chart types.

1 — I delete unnecessary elements and move elements that are in the wrong spot. In this case I selected the chart title and deleted it and moved the legend from the bottom of the page to the top left.

2 — I click the background of the chart and update it from a white fill color to ‘no fill’ and do the same for the grey border

3 — I update my axes and legend font colors to white by clicking on those elements and then using the font selection options under the ‘Home’ tab

4 — I select each data series (eg each set of stacked bars) and update the fill and border colors to something that will show up on my colored background

Now I have a chart that will look great on my card background, match my overall design, and it stands out from every other standard Excel bar chart.

New ways to use Excel

Once you’ve become familiar with all these design features it expands the types of projects you can use Excel for.

For example — many people have a workflow like this ⬇️

Copy-paste data into Excel → clean the data→do some basic calculations →copy paste that data out of Excel into PPT →style it in PPT and add it to your slide deck →share that PPT with your team

But if you do a good job with your visual design in Excel then you can simply build a beautiful template in your Excel doc that references the cells where you do your calculations.

In other words you add your data to Excel, do your calculations and your presentation automatically updates right there in Excel.

Infographics and more complex visuals

You can also start doing visuals in Excel that are a bit more complex.

In this example I used a sunburst chart as the base for a seasonal foraging guide. The individual sections are just a series of layered rectangles, images, text and icons.

But the final effect is a visualization that most people would never guess is built in Excel.

One of the easiest ways to build these skills is to simply look at another person’s XLSX file and start to deconstruct them. I have a couple ways for people to do that:

1 — I send out free sample templates every month as a newsletter: https://exceldashboardtemplate.com/newsletter

2 — I have a very detailed toolkit with 125 designs (25 charts in 5 different color palettes) and more: https://exceldashboardtemplate.com/