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About this lesson
Learn how to create and manage Custom Views in a worksheet.
Exercise files
Download this lesson’s related exercise files.
Custom Views.xlsx15.3 KB Custom Views - Completed.xlsx
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Quick reference
Topic
Custom views.
Description
Creating and managing Custom Views on a worksheet.
Where/when to use the technique
Custom views can be used to build a pre-packaged view of our spreadsheet, including hiding columns or rows. This can be very useful to build different looks to print out or show on screen.
Instructions
Creating Custom Views
- Expand the outlining to level 3
- Go to the View tab --> Custom Views --> +
- Give this View the name of “Full” and click OK
- Collapse the outlining to level 2
- Go to the View tab --> Custom Views --> +
- Give this View the name of “Compressed” and click OK
Using Custom Views
- Go to the View tab --> Custom Views --> Select the view you want --> Click Show
- The view will be activated
Modifying Custom Views
- Show the Compressed view
- Click the – button to collapse line 11 (the Revenues section)
- Go to the View tab --> Custom Views --> +
- Give this View the name of “Compressed” and click OK
- Click Yes when you are asked if you’d like to overwrite the view
- 00:04 >> In this video we're going to look at custom views.
- 00:07 And what a custom view is, is it's a way for you to define
- 00:12 how you would like something laid out so that you can potentially print it.
- 00:17 So the idea here is to be able to hide off specific rows or columns or
- 00:22 whatnot and get it into a better state to show for a certain way.
- 00:26 So if we look at the statement that we have here, this is a, possibly a familiar
- 00:31 looking little income statement with a whole bunch of detail on it.
- 00:34 Now the accountant may want the full detail here,
- 00:36 but when we actually send it out to to an investor,
- 00:40 we may actually want to send it out in a slightly compressed view, something that
- 00:44 looks a little bit more like this, or even like this, or even less.
- 00:49 Something along those lines.
- 00:51 So, to set up a custom view, what we're gonna do is we're gonna start off.
- 00:55 I'm gonna expand everything first, and I'm gonna go to the View tab, and
- 00:59 I'm gonna click on Custom Views.
- 01:02 And inside custom views, you can see that there's really not a whole heck of a lot
- 01:05 here right now, but there is a plus button.
- 01:07 So let's click plus.
- 01:10 And it says what is it that you'd like to actually call your views.
- 01:13 So I'm gonna call this one full.
- 01:15 What would I like to include?
- 01:16 The print settings?
- 01:17 Sure, no problem.
- 01:18 Hidden rows, columns, and filters?
- 01:20 Absolutely, that sounds great.
- 01:21 So we'll say OK.
- 01:24 And it doesn't really look like all that much except that when I collapse all this
- 01:29 stuff now, I can go back to custom views and
- 01:34 I can say let's take the full view, and let's click show.
- 01:37 And you'll notice that it resets everything the way I want.
- 01:41 Now, granted, I could do that by clicking the one or the three.
- 01:44 But what if I wanted to actually create a view that was a little bit different here?
- 01:48 So I'm gonna click the two, and I'm gonna collapse all of the costs and salaries and
- 01:52 supplies, and I'm gonna collapse just the revenue line.
- 01:54 So, this will take me just a couple of clicks to do through here.
- 01:57 Little bit different.
- 01:59 So I'm gonna go with Custom Views now, I'm gonna add a new one, and
- 02:03 I'm gonna call this one Semi-Compressed and again I'll take the Print setting so
- 02:10 this is anything that's done through the Page Layout, Print Set Up tabs.
- 02:14 The hidden rows columns and
- 02:15 filter settings includes the outlining views that we've done.
- 02:18 So we'll say, okay, no problem.
- 02:20 And then let's do one more.
- 02:22 We're going to click on this and collapse this right down,
- 02:26 then we'll go to custom views and we'll call this one fully compressed.
- 02:35 There we go.
- 02:37 So now I can very quickly go back to full.
- 02:41 I can very quickly go to Fully Compressed or
- 02:46 Semi-Compressed without any issue whatsoever.
- 02:52 So this is kind of a cool thing.
- 02:54 Now, what if I wanted to modify my Semi-Compressed for some reason,
- 02:58 I really wanted to be able to actually show all of the salaries on it?
- 03:01 Well, in order to do that, I'm gonna go back to custom views and
- 03:05 I'm gonna basically create a new view.
- 03:09 And I'm going to name it the same thing.
- 03:12 Semi-compressed.
- 03:14 What this will do, it's not really all that intuitive, but
- 03:17 this will overwrite the existing view.
- 03:19 It already exists, would you like to delete it and continue?
- 03:21 So we say, yes.
- 03:23 So it replaces that existing view.
- 03:25 So now, if I go back and I say, okay, well, let's look at fully compressed for
- 03:29 a second and then we'll go back and look at semi-compressed again.
- 03:32 You'll notice that it's been overwritten with the new version.
- 03:35 Okay? So that's the way you do it.
- 03:36 Unfortunately, there's no modify button that's actually in here.
- 03:40 Likewise, if I thought, man, this view is really not useful,
- 03:43 I'm never really gonna use this, I could also, of course, go back and say,
- 03:46 you know what, let's delete the semi-compressed view altogether.
- 03:49 And, yes, it'll go away.
- 03:52 We now just have the two views left.
- 03:53 So that's how you can create, modify and delete them.
- 03:56 Something that's really important to understand about custom views is that
- 03:59 these are really useful for being able to actually quickly go and
- 04:02 toggle your document into a state that you might want to use to print it.
- 04:07 Looking at this you might be tempted to say, well,
- 04:09 that's great, I could just compress it, save it and email to a user.
- 04:13 But remember,
- 04:14 if they know to look in custom views, they can very quickly open it back up.
- 04:19 So this is not security.
- 04:20 This is the way to compress it for convenience, not for security purposes.
- 04:25 So keep that in mind before you go and start hiding views and
- 04:28 sending them out the door to people.
- 04:30 You could get yourself in trouble that way.
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