Shaping User Instructions

We’ve talked in the past about the ability to use shapes on forms, but let’s revisit that today.  Let’s say you’ve been following along on this blog for the last while and have created a new spreadsheet with a pivot table in it.  You’d like to send this to your readers, but you know that they have differing levels of experience with pivot tables.  It might be helpful to provide a quick note explaining how to use the drop-down filter to select the region to be viewed.

First, let’s insert a shape which we will use to capture the note.  In Excel 2003, look for the Drawing toolbar (if you don’t see it, right-click on any button and ensure the Drawing toolbar is active), and then select Auto-Shapes and click on one of the shapes.  In Excel 2007, select Insert/Shapes and click on a shape.  Then, left-click your mouse on the spot on your spreadsheet where you’d like to insert the shape, and drag to specify the size of the shape you want to add.  You should see something like the following on your sheet:

Once you’ve got your shape, you then need to ‘activate’ it.  Do this by clicking on the border of the shape.  Next, right-click on the border and select Properties in Excel 2003 or Size and Properties in Excel 2007.  Switch to the Properties tab and de-select “Print Object.”  This allows the shape to appear on the screen but not on the printed page.

Finally, with the shape activated, you should be able to simply start typing your note and see the text appear in the shape.  If you don’t see any text appear, activate the shape again by clicking on the border, and then use your right-click to bring up the menu and select Edit Text.

This provides a quick and clean method to provide on-screen instructions without messing up the printed reports.