Adding text & aligning cells
Overview
Daniel Scott
Founder of Bring Your Own Laptop & Chief Instructor
instructorI discovered the world of design as an art student when I stumbled upon a lab full of green & blue iMac G3’s. My initial curiosity around using the computer to create ‘art’ developed into a full-blown passion, eventually leading me to become a digital designer and founder of Bring Your Own Laptop.
Sharing and teaching are a huge part of who I am. As a certified Adobe instructor, I've had the honor of winning multiple Adobe teaching awards at their annual MAX conference. I see Bring Your Own Laptop as the supportive community I wished for when I was first starting out and intimidated by design. Through teaching, I hope to bring others along for the ride and empower my students to bring their stories, labors of love, and art into the world.
True to my Kiwi roots, I've lived in many places, and currently, I reside in Ireland with my wife and kids.
So, first and most important is, let's put in the big word that says, I am a 'Quotation'. Now, that's fine, and it's fitting. Now, I'm going to show you, let's change the font size. I'm going to select it all, you can use this little option here, or under 'Home', up the top here.
I'm going to make it nice and big. You can see here, if I hit '28', it's big, and it's floated across to the other page, and it causes everything to fall apart. So, we're going to look at aligning things up. Aligning them.
So, at the moment this is aligned left, so it pushes out that way. So we're going to have this cell selected and up the top here, under 'Home', there's an option here that says 'Left Align', and it's just going to make sure that we're on this furthest cell, but it's pushing from the right, out left. So, if I keep adding text, in here now, it will keep going that way and not bunch into another page.
The other thing we need to know is, looking up the top here, we just need to keep an eye on this because there's going to be times where it does just jump out to this other page, and you're going to wonder what's wrong. So what's happening is, you can see there's this white area, and there's this kind of darker gray area. So the darker gray is what actually appears on the page. These wider gray here are the margins.
So nothing can appear here, and you can see, there's a little bit of gap between this last column. This guy here. This guy here, we'll forget this. I can make him a little bit bigger. A little bit bigger. But if I go too far, watch this, if I go past, into the white stuff, it goes up, boom… and ends up wrecking everything. So I'm going to 'undo' that. You can push it all the way out here. Just make sure our cell doesn't span across this gap here. Just to make sure everything fits in there. There's my quotation, great.
Fonts, you can change easily up here, we're going to use 'Calibri', fine, and you might have a corporate font, you can change it too. And we're going to add just some basic details in here. Now I'm going to leave this line here free, just like a spacer. I'm going to type in our address. Our office in New Zealand is at 666, Great South road, terrible address. It brings good luck for us anyway. And we're going to put in our address. Easy, that's our address.
We're going to look at putting in some other digits. So we're going to put in our date. I'll just put it over here. There's no specific place. Now, what I want to do is have the 'Date' here, and underneath it I'm going to have the 'Quote number'. I'll just put in a hash '#'. Hash even, '#:' And underneath that, it's going to be 'Valid for'.
Now, quotes can be a little bit different, depending on the industry, you might have to go through and find some examples o quotations. Just make sure you got all the details you need. We're going to put in all the main basic stuff. You can add or remove as you need.
One thing I want though, you can see it's kind of aligning to the left, and if I start putting details over here, I want them all to align to the right, because they look nicer. I'm going to select all three of these, and I'm going to go 'Right Align', so all the colons are lined up.
Now, over here, we're going to put in-- we're going to skip date for the moment. We're going to put in '100' for the quote number. You can put any number you want, it doesn't have to be a number. But say we do put in a number in here. We're starting our-- say it's the first day of business, we want to impress people, like we’ve already got customer 99, but you're not. You're no. 1, but you want to feel like that 99.
What happens when you're formatting numbers is, text wants to be left aligned by default. So if I put text in, left aligned, if I put in numbers, watch, right aligned. These are just the defaults for those two ways of entering data. We can overwrite them.
So, first of all, I want my number to be left aligned, and I also want those 0s back in. And to do that, we're going to have it selected, and we're going to be on 'Home', and we're going to use this option here. See this little group called 'Number'. And in the drop down, at the top here, 'General'. Kind of gets rid of those two 0s. And what we're going to do is switch the text. This makes it do less, just kind of goes in as block text. So now if I hit '00', it will stay there and not move. You might need these for your quotation numbering.
Valid for, we're going to say '30 days'. The other thing we want to do is-- we'll deal with the date as well, I know I haven't done the date, we'll do that in the next video, but there's not much of a gap between these here, so I'm going to select all of these, and what I could do is, I could kind of grab these, and cut them, and paste them over here, and make this one really small. That kind of formatting does work, but what I want to do is select all of these guys, and I'm going to use, under 'Home', there's one in here called 'Indent'. So there's a decrease, and increase. I want to increase the indent, just to push it across a little bit so there's a big gap between the two.
There’s still the rest of our details. This is going to be client details. I'm going to 'Bold' this one. 'Control B', or you can use the 'Bold' at the top here. And this is where you put in some place holders. This is obviously going to change depending on every client. Maybe, 'Client Name', 'Business Name', and this will be replaced for every person. Also 'Address'. Often, some businesses, well a lot of businesses I deal with need these details. They need 'Business Name', their limited company name, and their address. And potentially their 'Phone Number' as well, otherwise they don't accept this as a valid quote.
The next thing we're going to do is, we're going to add some special instructions. Now, this might seem simple, we're just going to add, like 'Notes'. It might just be some details, like special delivery instructions, or just any sort of thing, like special things you need to add to this quote to expand it, right? That's pretty easy, but what I want to do is, I want a nice big chunk of--- I get text that I can put in to this, because what happens is, I've got some text that I want to put in, so if I go to my 'Exercise Files', and open up a quote, '01 Quotation Copy', there's just a little bit of text that I want to add. So I'm going to copy that and paste it into Excel. And if I paste it into a cell here, what happens is, this runs on forever, and pushes it on to this other page. Loads of problems. So I'm going to 'undo'.
There's a couple of things I want to do. I'm going to select all of these guys, so I've got two rows, and a bunch of columns. And what I'm going to do is I'm going to merge them, so under 'Home', and along the top here, there's one called 'Merge & Center'. Merge and center means it's going to merge these cells, and it means that the text is going to appear in the center of the cell. That's not what I want. In this little dropdown here, there's one simple one, called 'Merge Cell'. So now it's one big text box. If I paste inside of it, 'double click', hit Paste'. Still kind of works, watch this, I click off, kind of goes there, but then its cut off.
So what I want to do is, I've pasted my text in, like I just did there, got it selected, this one cell, and at the top, just above where it says 'Merge', there's one called 'Text Wrap’. That’s what I want. It means that it's going to get to the end of this box, and not just get cut off, but it's going to wrap back around. You can make this as tall as you need to. You might make it three cells just in case there's lots of text in there.
So that is how to do some basic text input. We've done some cell merging, and some aligning. Let's look at putting the date in, in the next video. Why is this special? We'll see in the next video.