Have you ever griped about an Excel limitation and then suddenly realized there’s a simple solution? That just happened to me.
For a long time, I’ve wished that Excel would anti-alias large font sizes. Without anti-aliasing, Excel’s large fonts have jaggies, as this section of a large letter “B illustrates.
Fonts don’t need to be THIS large for the jaggies to be obvious. You often can see the jaggies when fonts are larger than 20 points or so. But the larger the font, the more obvious the jaggies become.
This morning, I was working on a new dashboard report, which uses a headline of 96 points; so it has bad jaggies. Then I had an idea, which you can see here:
In this figure, I first entered the word “BOG” in cell A1 and changed the font size to 96 points. You can see the jaggies easily.
The second version of the word does not show jaggies. This is because it appears in a text box, which does anti-alias text in New Excel (Excel 2007 and above). Just to emphasize that the text is in a text box, I left the box’s borders visible. But in normal practice, I would remove them.
Finally, here’s the last trick for this solution:
You can link a text box to the contents of a cell. That way, as your data changes, so does the text displayed in the text box. To do so, just select the edge of your text box, enter an equal sign in your formula bar, and then enter a cell reference or a range name after the equal sign in your formula bar.
With this approach, your anti-aliased headlines can change as your data changes.
