Transcription
So the Excel sheet in front of you acts like a phone book. You enter a name and then you’re provided with a phone number. And this works because I have formulas within this cell, we’ll take a look at that shortly. But I also added another feature that lets you lookup by number, not just by name. And if you do this, you can see the result is “Nothing found” because there’s no phone number that’s called “Sawyer, Allen”. So we’re going to delete this, and instead we’re going to search for “Sawyer, Allen”‘s phone number, so in this case it’s 999-174-5493, press ENTER, and there you go, it finds a name. That’s great and all, but let’s take a look at the formula that makes it happen.
Here it is. As you can see, there’s quite a bit of stuff to read here. I can click to have some coloring, it helps, you know, I can tell what’s what, but you do have to read it, and there’s a lot of text up there. So the moment I learned about this trick, I never stopped using it. So here’s the first step, increase the formula bar so that you have more height. And then go to a part of the formula where you wish you could break the line, where you could actually have a break line to make things more readable. In my case I would do it right here, because that’s the first parameter of the IF function, which is at the highest level, as you can see from the pop-up there, that Excel gives you. There’s three parameters, right? There’s a logical test, there’s a value of true, and there’s a value of false. So why not separate them one line at a time? There’s a way to do this, people, and it blew my mind. ALT+ENTER, look at this! How beautiful is this! And then you go to the next parameter, and then do the same thing, ALT+ENTER, so now you know just from looking at it real quick, this is the logical test, this is what happens if it’s true, and this is what happens if it’s false.
Now, it’s still cryptic, there’s other things you can do to improve this, but already this really helps with the readability of the formula. Now there’s one downside, once you start doing this, you have to remember, I’m going to save this. Once you start doing this, you have to remember that your sheet might have formulas that are cut off. [Laughs] This is something you have to keep in mind, so if I’m clicking on a cell and quickly glancing at the formula bar, I might actually think that that’s all there is up here, “oh, the formula’s this short”, but wait, wait, no. [Laughs] First if you drag down, you’ll see there’s more to it than that, and I guess that’s the thing, once you start leveraging this for readability, you have to consider that, you know, that there might be something there, even if you’re just seeing one row. But to me this just a quality of life improvement – and such a readability boost, because I’m used to working in true programming/development environments where I’m able to put tabs, I’m able to put indents, curly brackets, just organize things. So I can’t do exactly that here, but I can certainly do at least this to break down what I’m doing. And in another video, I’ll show you other tips on how to improve readability because it’s super important.