Using CHECKBOXES in Excel v Google Sheets - Which is better?!

 In the good ol' days it was Lotus 1-2-3 as Goliath with Excel as the David.

Now Microsoft Excel is the 800-pound gorilla in terms of marketshare and Google Sheets is barely nipping at its heels. BUT THAT DOESN'T MEAN EXCEL IS ACTUALLY BETTER!

There are definitely areas where Excel shines (the sheer capacity/size of the potential spreadsheet, etc).

But there are a LOT of areas where Google Sheets is just SO much better.

Did you ever try to create a bunch of checkboxes in a spreadsheet? I need to create a template for my organization so people can track a whole bunch of tasks. I figured it would be trivial so I looked it up and found a bunch of sites explaining how to do this in Excel (we are a Microsoft shop so this made sense). It seemed so complicated, requiring either a very labor-and-time-intensive process of manually editing each checkbox or else requiring writing Visual Basic code to make it happen.

Really?! To make a bunch of checkboxes for a simple task list?!

Then I explored what the difference is with Google Sheets and found this article.

https://www.automateexcel.com/how-to/insert-multiple-checkboxes/

Let me sum up:

Microsoft Excel

1. Go deep into advanced settings to add the Developer option to your ribbon
2. Click on insert / tools / checkbox
3. Click somewhere in your spreadsheet to add the checkbox
4. Carefully resize and position to fit nicely where you want it to go (typically in the center of a cell)
5. Right-click on that checkbox and go into properties
6. Change the text and type in a cell to link to
7. Want to add another? Go back to step #2 and do it all over again. Yes, you can copy/paste or use the fill handle to make steps 3 & 4 a little bit faster, but ultimately you need to do all that work for every single checkbox. Adding 1000 - plan on an hour or so of mind-numbingly boring work!

Google Sheets

1. Click in the cell where you want the checkbox
2. Click on insert and checkbox - DONE!
3. You want to add 1000? Instead of clicking in one cell in step 1 select all 1000 cells and then insert - THAT'S IT!

Come on, Excel! You can do better than that!

(There's a lot of other areas that Excel could learn from Google Sheets - this one just so totally blew me away that I had to say something.)

REQUEST: prompt me to create a calendar event when I send the email

I am waiting to see this in either gmail or Outlook...

I am FOREVER writing an email to people and setting up appointments but then forgetting to transfer them to my calendar.

I want to see an add-on or lab that examines the outgoing email (maybe before it is even sent?!) and recognizes text setting up a meeting and prompts to add that meeting to my calendar.

I suppose the awkward thing would be the number of false positives...

Anyway, my inspiration for the day.

Preparing to factory reset my android phone

Most everything on my phone is automatically sync'd to the cloud. This means if I don't do any backup at all I still don't lose those things.

On my system these things have to be manually backed up:
* nova settings and screen setup
* s-note doesn't seem to back itself up to Evernote except when I manually tell it to do so
* pictures are automatically backed up to Dropbox and Google but it's a good idea to confirm - I didn't realize that I had gone over my quota just now and would have lost several pics
* documents other than Google docs (files located in documents or etc)
* music
* ring tones (maybe backed up? What about special ring tones for specific people?)
* setup for tasker
* setup for alarm plus
* setup for my profile manager
* beyondpod settings

For anything backed up, make sure it goes on the external SD card - last time I did this I put all the backups in a directory on the builtin SD card and lost them all.

---
Done. Here's what I regret...
* sms messages - forgot to back up
* WiFi pw - surely there is some way to back them up - why didn't this happen automatically?!
* viber messages - why doesn't this backup automatically to my gmail backup account?!

Choosing a screenshot grabber...

I am not a professional in this area. I don't plan on spending $50. In fact, I don't spent on spending more than $5 and I'll be a little disappointed if it's not free...

But I do find myself increasingly teaching people how to do things on the computer and a good screen-grabber is REALLY convenient for that!

I've been using skitch since when it was still an EverNote product. I really like its simplicity and its price, but it's maybe just a little too simple...  Here's what I don't like about Skitch:

• Only one style arrow (although I do like that one style - very aesthetically pleasing, but it gets boring after a while)
• Can only keep one screenshot onscreen so not easy to go back to a previous one (yes, you can save it and re-open it, but I'm looking for a list of thumbnails to click on or at least a most-recently-used list)
• Every time you grab a new screenshot you have to go through a dialog to discard the existing one. That really slows me down when I'm in the midst of grabbing a bunch of screenshots to describe a process.
• Some screenshots require a delay because you have to get the screen ready (context menus, etc.). Skitch does not support this capability.
• And the biggie: NO WAY TO CHANGE FONT SIZE ON TEXT

Now I've been pretty pleased with Skitch. By using some "snipping tool" (built into windows) and some clipmate (separate product but has basic screen grab capabilities) I've been able to do most of what I want. This post is seeing if there's not something better out there.  So let's dive in.

Screenshot Captor

I really wanted to like this one. I'm a bit of a geek and this strikes me as a geek's kind of tool. I like the donation-ware model.

But I just couldn't get around the lack of aesthetics. Take a look at this arrow:

 

Now I'm the last person who should be complaining about aesthetics, but it's just ... boring! And that's after messing with it a little bit - the out-of-the-box arrow was unthinkable!

Here's what I was getting out-of-the-box with Skitch:

 

I don't know - that's just nice looking. And the arrow is my #1 go-to when explaining things.

Text can have the font adjusted, but it's all-or-nothing within a single box. I'd really like to be able to say "STEP 1" with the number quite a bit larger (on the next line) than the letters in the same box. The blurring is very well done and the capturing of scrolling areas is really cool. But they lost me on their boring arrow. Sorry.

Greenshot

Hmmm... The arrow is better, but still not measuring up to Skitch. Check it out here:

 

Maybe I've just fallen in love with that pretty arrow from Skitch.  Maybe I need to get over that...

The actual editing feels a little awkward right now whereas editing in Skitch feels as natural as breathing, but I can't compare it to a product I've been using for quite a while. Something about needing to switch back to the select tool is slowing me down, but maybe I'll get used to that.  OOOH, I see it has hot-keys for all the tools, including ESC for going back to the select tool - that's going to start feeling like vim pretty soon, so that's all good. The export to MS Office is a cute tool (although it doesn't seem to work going to OneNote).

The download size is miniscule - barely over a megabyte! How do they do all this in such a small program?!

It doesn't support multiple fonts within a single text-box, but other than that I'm not finding a whole lot not to love about greenshot... (Exception being made for my little thing I've got for that Skitch arrow.)

SnapDraw

First impression - 16 megabytes of download. After Greenshot (which felt like a hamster) it feels like I've just stumbled over a brontosaurus! But size of download is pretty much a non-issue these days so I won't make a deal out of it. (Although I'm still waiting for the download. Ho, hum, twiddle-my-thumbs...)

Ooooo... Aaaaaahhhh...  That's nice!  All my concerns about arrows and aesthetics? Look at this choice of arrows in a library of arrows:

 

And the editor seems amazingly powerful -- all kinds of effects and stuff. Yes, it'll take a bit more effort just because I have so many more choices, but I could really get into this.

HOWEVER, this program seems to be TERRIBLE at actually grabbing a screenshot! It's got all these modes, but what I do 90% of the time is select a region of the screen that *I* choose. And I can't figure out how to make SnapDraw do that! I'm banging my head on it for going on 10 minutes and no such luck... 

OK, I've submitted it to them as a support issue. We'll see what they say. They use a different type of screen-grabbing approach than the other programs I'm used to, but I could get used to it except for this lack of a region-grab capability.

I'll go ahead and post this for now and get back to it if they get back to me.