Spreadsheets are beautiful
5 tips on how to keep brand consistent in a non-design team, using only Stone Age tools
If you are working in a design agency, what I am going to tell you, may surprise you. People use MS Office tools. Alway. Exclusively. If you are working a design agency, most likely this article will seem like a note from Mars to you. Enjoy.
I have been working in a b2b set up for ages. In my professional work, roughly half of the deliverables I produce is templating for a greater development team. This includes, but is not limited to, educational and documentation materials, external and internal communication templates and various management documents.
One could write PhD-worth of material on this subject, but let’s be real, you are not going to go to Google Scholar to learn how to stop your project manager from sending you ugly slide decks. In here I will simply show a sample that may inspire you to have a fresh look onto the old tools. Please, mind, This is not a thought-through article, but rather a note written in under 15 minutes. About the work that I do not see happening in the industry.
The whole dilemma is not about having all of your documents looking like they cost you a million bucks. It is a bout having respect to your viewer in every document you deliver. And in doing so, considering that your immediate team is amid the “viewers” as well. Even the internal documents, dashboards and comms do not have to look like they came from someone’s 90's nightmare.
Tip #1. Convince your team to use Google Docs
Google’s Tools are superior in quality to MS ones in about 1 million and 1 ways. Switch to Google Drive when possible. In many offices “security” restrictions apply that would prevent employees from doing so. Of course, in reality, the security threat is minor. Microsoft has been paying into legislation lobbying long before we’ve heard about digital security for the first time. And today quite many “security” standards are pre-supposing that the only tool one can use in a civil service office, for example is MS. This has nothing to do with reality. But hey #hypernormalisation
Meanwhile, in 9 out of 10 companies whose hands are not (or not entirely) bonded with the fake regulations of safety the block is in the attitude. There are usually two teams in here.
Team A: Your designers. “Designers” (aka graphic designers of early 2000s training, who only know how to use Adobe) will say that
“Google is as shitty as MS, so there is no use for the hassle. Just send me all the files and I will process client-facing documents in InDesign”
Here, I will not stop to explain why, but this practice is redundant, poisonous and only contributes to the problem. It contributes to waterfall processes in the team, creates bottlenecks and absolutely excludes majority of the office from ever directly touching final work. Wake up “designers”, today a Texas housewife can cut a feature movie without you, release it, earn her pension and all of it without InDesign. Time to move on.
Team B: Your manager. In a contemporary office this title covers a category that can be also defined as “everyone else”. The problem with these guys shifting their practice is that they have nearly never had to actually learn any tool. Most often these folks use PowerPoint daily, yet they still wouldn’t know how to vertically align three blocks of text.
In this case, time is your best friend. Do not expect to solve this in one go and magically migrate all your office into using collaboration-friendly tools. It will take you tedious work meeting-by-meeting, template-by-template. But with steady enough effort on your side, you can pull a few of these folks into your processes. And sooner than you know, your work will not anymore be editing PowerPoints through the bloody tears on the deadline night.
One top of the core promise of giving you a flexible working environment (built-in version control, an opportunity to work in teams, a total versatility when it comes to the machines your team-mates use, noob entry-level), you can finally adjust your working materials along the bran guidelines. Does it matter? Well, you decide, it is a subject to another conversation. I personally believe that well done templates empower your colleagues in carrying on deliverables of higher quality.
In case you are using a standard MS Office the following material may have limited use to you.
Tip #2. Crop your sheet tab to what you need.
Alright, now here is the beef. In doing what I start doing here, we are absolutely abusing spreadsheets as a tool. But if you have spend at least a day in an average office on planet Earth, you know for a fact that 100% of tools are being abused at all times (this is an accurate fact). Unless, of course, you work in the IT support. These guys live by the book.
So, in case you spreadsheet tab is not dynamic (aka, there are no queries populating it and no external forms attached that may reconfigure your row/column count) — go ahead an cut off the unnecessary raw and columns. For this select them, right click them and delete them. Voila! You’ve got yourself a lot less threatening document. Now when you show it to your junior colleagues they won’t have to scroll through seven thousand of empty rows.
In my case, as you can see on the header image, the rows and columns are limited in count by the schedule structure. No need to have empty slots all around.
By the way, if you wonder, why even this schedule doc is handled in the sheets, there is a reason. We do the rest of the event management in the sheets: RSVP tables, budget, notes are all in it. Hence, a convenience having a single document outweighs the minor appeal of the “beautiful print”. These schedules are purely practical and do not have to be a custom work of art. Anyone in a team must be able to edit it on the fly. Not only chosen unicorn designers with their magical Adobe kits and expensive macs.
Tip #3. Use your “brand” font
Chances are your actual brand font is something incredibly specific that “a real designer” has picked for your company for “real designs”. As you may know, unless you produce a sick load of merchandise, your team is never using it. Because you can never import it into your soft, you can never export it into a final document and send it to the client or simply because only “a real designer” has a license for using this very font file.
Well, luckily for all us normal Earth people, we do not really see major difference in between the fonts. You may simply find a close-enough Google font to use in your Google Docs (sorry, Tip#1 has to apply here…).
Now, this trick does magic in Google Slides. While your sales department can keep using their favourite “PowerPoint”-like tool, you can set the templates to have a font that looks better than Arial. (Unless, of course, you have to send ppt files for the client. Then you are stuck with Arial and Times. Sorry, mate. You gotta take one for the team, I guess).
When your outputs are pdf — even the spreadsheet exports now can be relatively on-brand. Add splashes of brand-book approved colours and you are good to go on.
In my case, I have to substitute Moderat font with a version friendly for web documents. I’ve picked a Muli set, because it goes in several line thickness (from Extra Light to Black). The letters are not too close to Moderat, but the general vibe is close and the versatility of the font kit allows for most of the daily uses.
Tip #4. Mind your export
That’s a boring one. But sort of important. All spoken above has a major setback in case you actually have to circulate standard MS documents. For example, Microsoft has vendor-locked a lot of hospitals with their soft ages ago. They can not afford an update, and, once again, “security” regulations prevent them from doing so. So, once you start working with nurses, you can not “just send a pdf”. They simply can’t install Adobe Reader onto their ancient machines. They only have a standard MS Office kit to open your attachments. Little good can be done there. You can try. But it is Sisyphean labour in many cases. Thoughts and prayers towards you, my sister. Maybe one day your work documents can also be readable.
Once again returning to the world of usual business team: you can rewire your colleagues to send PDFs. Most of your client iPhones can open them. PDFs are great! Hail the PDF!
But even if you are trendy and cool and all your exports are PDFs double-check the output. For example, in Google Slides you can page a Page Size to a custom scale, in case you need to complement print. In one of my previous offices “real designers” have dismissed Google Sheets entirely because it was giving “way too low-res exports” for print. Study your case and pick the format that works for you. In my case with the schedule it should fit in a single A4, so we can drop it onto the event tables or send it as an easy to read, you’ve guessed it, PDF.
Tip #5. Erase the box
Yes, you could do it all along. Yes you can do it in most of the Office tools (Be it Google, MS or Open Office). Go live your life with this knowledge now, if it hasn’t landed upon you earlier.
Now, we’ve covered earlier, that what we do here is an abomination to the overall idea of a spreadsheet. But even when you do a classy accounting, sometimes you may want to erase unnecessary box borders in between the subtables for a better reading flow.
In cases like mine, when you are creating a fully custom look for a fully custom purpose, you do not have to keep any of the original sheet borders. Shocking, I know. Now, here is where Google clearly did it better. Their border editor is direct and quick. In MS tools you will break your wrist doing the same job.
In conclusion
Do you remember the sentiment with which I’ve taken off? It is about the respect to your team and the viewer. My team needs easy-to-edit templates. My viewers need a branded experience that fit seamlessly to the day. Nowhere there in the brief has it said that “the work you design has to fit Uffizi walls”.
In the old-school manners being polite is saying “With greatest joy” in the beginning of the email. In my reality, the attachments I receive from you must be well done. After all, I will spend days reading some of them.
Use the soft that fits the challenge at hand. Not the soft that comes with your laptop. Not the soft that came with your design degree either. Be real. Stay awake. Reduce your simple-carb intake. (Seriously, this makes you times and times less sleepy during the day. But that’s another subject.)
