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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 - Begin.xlsx25.2 KB Custom Views - Complete.xlsx
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Quick reference
Custom Views
Creating and managing Custom Views on a worksheet.
When to use
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 > Add
- Give this View the name of “Full” and click OK
- Collapse the outlining to level 2
- Go to the View tab > Custom Views > Add
- 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 > Add
- 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 All right, we've built this cool financial report and we go off to the board
- 00:08 meeting and we really want to display it in a factor that looks like this.
- 00:13 But then one of the board members says, listen, I want to see all the detail.
- 00:16 So we click on the three to expand everything.
- 00:20 Once the questions have been answered,
- 00:21 they say can you go back to that previous version?
- 00:24 And now, you've got to go back and you got to click a buttons here and
- 00:26 you click a button here.
- 00:27 You're messing around wasting a little bit of time here as everybody's getting
- 00:31 frustrated, because things aren't happening instantly.
- 00:34 You've been there, you know how this works.
- 00:36 So do we have a better method for the way we can actually make stuff happen?
- 00:41 And the answer is yes, we do.
- 00:42 We have these cool things called Custom Views.
- 00:46 Now, what I'm going to do is I'm going to expand all of my data back open here.
- 00:50 I'm going to go to the View tab, and I'm going to make myself a new Custom View.
- 00:55 To do that, I'm going to click Add and I'm just going to type in a title for it,
- 00:59 I'm going to call this one full.
- 01:01 Now, you'll notice I have the ability to control print settings,
- 01:04 things like margins and stuff like that.
- 01:06 As well as hidden rows, columns, and filter settings.
- 01:09 I'm going to leave both of those checked and say, okay, and
- 01:12 it doesn't really appear that anything's happened.
- 01:15 But here you go.
- 01:16 What we're going to do now is I'm going to go and set up an alternate view.
- 01:19 I'm going to collapse all of this stuff down, go to Custom Views,
- 01:24 click Add and I'm going to choose to make a new view called collapsed.
- 01:31 We'll say, OK and now, when somebody wants to see all the data,
- 01:36 I can go and click on full and show.
- 01:38 Here we go, and now, when they asked to see the compressed data.
- 01:42 I can go back to collapsed,
- 01:43 except that I could have easily got there by clicking the one.
- 01:47 And this isn't actually what I need.
- 01:48 So I'm still going to be messing around right now, messing some buttons there.
- 01:53 So let's fix that Custom View that I just made,
- 01:57 and let's make this the Collapsed View.
- 02:00 So we'll go to Custom Views, we'll go to Collapsed.
- 02:04 Now, at this point in time, what you really want to do is you just want to edit
- 02:07 it and it doesn't appear that there's any edits.
- 02:10 So you could click delete and create a new one or
- 02:14 you can do this Add and typing the exact same name Collapsed.
- 02:19 It will come back and say, hey, this already exists.
- 02:21 Do you want to delete it and continue?
- 02:23 And we'll say yes.
- 02:25 It really shouldn't say delete it and continue, it should really say replace it,
- 02:28 because that is exactly what it does.
- 02:30 So check this out.
- 02:31 We can now go Full, show everything.
- 02:35 And then when they ask us to return to the collapsed version, we can click collapse
- 02:40 and it goes back to the semi-compressed version that we actually set up.
- 02:45 So this is a pretty nice, handy feature for
- 02:47 allowing you to very quickly toggle between different views.
- 02:51 Now, there is something that's very, very important to recognize about this.
- 02:55 Of course, you don't have to do things just with the views.
- 02:59 If somebody decides they want to drill into one of these and one of these, and
- 03:02 then says, can you go back to the collapse version?
- 03:04 We can absolutely do that.
- 03:06 Okay, so that's great.
- 03:08 But the other thing that's important to recognize here is that the data,
- 03:13 it is being shown in this view is all still here.
- 03:16 It's just filtered and
- 03:17 what that means is you should not look at this as a security feature.
- 03:21 In other words, don't apply a View, Save the workbook and
- 03:25 email it out to a supplier.
- 03:27 When it's got all of your other suppliers’ data in there, that's bad news.
- 03:30 Because all they need to do is just, click the Filter and show it, okay?
- 03:34 So we don't want that to happen.
- 03:36 It's not a security feature.
- 03:38 Where this is awesome is for
- 03:40 quickly flipping through things that you need to see or being in presentations.
- 03:45 Or maybe you're going to print it to a PDF that static and send it out to someone.
- 03:50 In this way, you're not going to forget to hide the critical pieces before you do so.
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