5 Mistakes the Most Common Seen on Data Sheet Templates
Check these 5 common mistakes. Analyse them and read for how to avoid them.
Design is an important factor in the creation of data sheet template and as it boosts the appearance of the data sheet template. Other than that, it could also be used by the creator to give a better understanding about the contents inside the data sheet template. Now, before this article go further, some of you may not know and wondering, what is data sheet template?
What is a data sheet template?
Data sheet template is a standardized data sheet with some certain layout and formatting to serve as the starting point for the new product. Once you have created the data sheet template, you can easily edit it, input some information, or maybe, just slightly add/remove something. And, ‘boom’, you will have the new work completed in a blink of an eye. Therefore, never ever reinvent the wheel every time you start a new data sheet, ever again!
Most Common Mistakes on Data Sheet Templates
With all of those conveniences that data sheet templates provide, there is still a drawback from these sorts of templates. The disadvantage is that it is hard to create a perfect data sheet template and usually lots of mistakes are made by the creator. In accordance with the title of this article, here are 5 mistakes the most common seen in data sheet templates.
1. Uncorrelated
In general, template of data sheet contains a lot of contents and information, such as photos, tables, data, in which can be edited by the users later on. There are several creators of templates that do not care about these contents of the templates. They just randomly input some photos, information, and data, that do not even correlated with each other. Because for them, it is just a template, wherein will be changed by the users later. However, it is a false concept of data sheet templates! Users will get confused and sometimes baffled, because of these carelessly created templates. These contents and information should be carefully organized so that it will be related to the products in the data sheet. As a result, the data sheet template could give a clear understanding of its layout and structure. And, with its understandable layout and structure, users will be able to edit that template easily.
Let’s take a look at this example:
Data sheet layout — 1
Data sheet layout — 2
What do you think? Which one is better and more appealing, the first one or second one? Indeed, the answer is second one.
So, make sure to keep your layout & design as simple and as clear as possible. Do not ever forget that your prospective customers read lots of data sheet to find the right product. And, approximately, you have only 30 seconds to impress them. Therefore, I am suggesting you to emphasize more on the crucial points and put them into the data sheet to build strong bridge with your customers.
2. Too Much Design — Overly Designed
Secondly, indeed, design is an integral part of data sheet template, because visual components are a great way to present data as they are rather intuitive to interpret. But, too much of it will damage the template itself. Users of the template may be overly distracted by the excessive designs. A good data sheet design shouldn’t divert users from the metrics, because it is the data that users need to focus on, not only the visuals. For users, an overly designed data sheet template is hard to understand and edit, because it is not discernible. Therefore, do not ever going overboard with the formatting and design.
Just remember that “too much design” is equal to “messiness”!
3. Too Plain — Not Designed Enough
As I mention earlier, design is an important part of data sheet template. Without design, your data sheet would look like a plain scratch paper, which is unattractive and unappealing for the prospective users. Moreover, design could also be used to effectively explain the information in the data sheet.
However, different data sheet templates would have different style of design. Usually, the style of the design is based on the industry of the company. For example, semiconductor industry prefer to use simple templates without much colors’ contrast, whereas the product consumed on B2C market are presented with lots of contrast and colorful datasheet template to attract the customers’ attention.
Hence, make sure to give your data sheet a face lift through design that correlated with the industry of your company. And, different industry, indeed, have different data sheet template’s design.
4. Showing Everything On One Page
So, what do you think about this data sheet template? Is it understandable and editable?
How about this one? Surely, the second template is much better than the first one, right? It is truly fine for data sheet template to have more than one page. Furthermore, by using more than One page, it means that there is more choice for users to choose. For example, if the users don’t like the design or the format of the first page of the template, then, they can easily delete the first page and use the second page of it. Do not ever let down the users because of the structure of your data sheet template. Never ever show everything on one page, ever again.
5. Typing Error & Missing Data
Finally, these are the most unnoticeable mistakes made by the creator of data sheet template. However, it turns out that these 2 mistakes can be easily noticed by the users of the template and may lead to bad impression and judgment to the data sheet template, or even to the company that creates the template. Other than that, it could also lead to misidentification by the users.
- Typing Error — Even a slight typing error or known as “typo” may emerge an image of unprofessionalism of the creator of the data sheet template.
- Missing Data — No date, no company’s name, no (or incomplete) metadata (metadata records document the who, what, when, where, how, and why of a data resource)
How to avoid those mistakes?
TDSmaker provides tremendous conveniences for users to create or to use data sheet templates that contain no such mistakes. Thus, the data sheet templates that were provided are correlated, aesthetically designed, having good structure, and having no typing error & missing data.
There are hundreds of options with TDSmaker for formatting your template. However, you should stick to the defaults wherever possible. For more tutorial and guidance on how to create or use data sheet templates in TDSmaker, check out TDSmaker YouTube Channel.
This piece was written by Travis Setjawardaja and originally published at blog.tdsmaker.com.
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