Spreadsheets are great at making data easy to see and understand. But it pays off to take some time with your spreadsheets to make them easy to read. For example, making the first row into a "header", which describes what is in each column, makes a huge difference in how easily someone can interpret the data. You can even make the header always appear at the top of the spreadsheet, so that you can tell what's what even when scrolling down the page. You can do the same thing with the first column of data, to identify what's in each row. You can also change the sizes of columns or rows, so that the data fits inside.
Data in cells can be formatted just like text in a document. You can change size, font, color, alignment, and more. You can also format the cells themselves. You can change the border, background color, and size of each cell, row, or column, or even join two or more cells together (called a “merge”). Most of the formatting options are found on the toolbar. Some others are in the format menu, or in the context menu (right-click or 2-finger click). Make sure you look through all these options and play around with them. There are a lot of possibilities!
Data is also formatted into data types. You can set a range of cells to be formatted as a number with a certain number of decimal points after it, as money, as a date, or as text, just to name a few examples. This can save you a lot of time, and make your data much easier to read. It can also help keep you from making mistakes, like multiplying text by a date.
