I have an excel questions for you gurus of spreadsheets:
I work a lot with lists of items that are grouped by indentation. So you have a group title, and it’s items which are indented. There might be a large number of groups, some of which will be sub group of a group, or a sub-sub-sub group of a group, etc.
Suffice it to say that it can be a pain to make sure everything is properly indented to reflect what group it belongs to. And no, I can’t just use columns to delineate groups.
Is there any way in excel to make the indentation a little clearer? The main problem is that with a lot of sub and sub sub, etc items It’s hard to tell how many indentations have been applied to a set of items. If there was a little arrow, some graphic, or even a number it would help out a lot!
Frankly, I think you need to revise this system - it’s terrible. Each entry needs it’s own row, all with the information on it. If you need a report that indents to indicate what group (or sub-sub-sub-group) it belongs to, that’s what pivot reports are for.
Not sure which version of Excel you have, newest version (2007) has a pretty advanced Conditional Formatting suite but older versions can do it too.
Anyway, Google it for your version to see how.
Essentially, based on rules that look at what you just input in a given cell, Excel will auto-format that cell. You can color the cell or put icons in or a lot of things (doubt you can indent though).
Worth a look at least.
You can also setup a pick-list so that, if the entries in a cell are always one of a limited list of items, it will try to auto-complete for you as well as act as data validation so the entries are uniform (e.g. Christine or Christopher instead of Chris).
Read the help entries for outlining and grouping. In your case the outlining would have to be applied manually (there is an auto feature). The levels are shown as numbers at the top left of the grid. You can click on any level to show just that level if you don’t want to see all the subs. You can also click to compress or expand any particular group. But there is a limit to the depth (which I don’t remember right now; it’s not large, maybe 5 or 6 levels).
Excel pretty much sucks at formatting. My only idea is to create a column that contains entries that would sort the way you want for the indenting. Use that column to sort and then hide it.