Container to Align, Size & Format

The Zen philosopher Basha once wrote, 'A flute with no holes is not a flute. A donut with no hole is a Danish.' He didn't say, ‘Two wrongs don't make a right, but three rights make a left,’ but it does.

Which brings me to my point. Follow my (non-religious but you should live them religiously) 10 Commandments.

The IE Plugin does a fine job of fine-tuning the look of your dashboard. You have control of alignment, size, color, actions, triggers, etc. Unfortunately, many of your users disobey your order to use IE and wind up using your dashboards with AJAX.

One of the most maddening problems is with list boxes. We spend a lot of time making sure they are aligned and spaced perfectly. Then we forget to check web view. Then we cuss when we happen to open it in Chrome. Fortunately, there’s a simple, if tedious, fix.

Containers aren't just for charts

The fix is to house your list boxes in Containers. The Container will take care of your spacing, size and formatting problems. The catch is that the initial formatting is very tedious.

Create your Container, go to the Presentation tab and change the ‘Container Type’ to ‘Grid’. Set your columns to ‘1’ and your rows to the number of list boxes that you are going to add. Adjust your spacing, if desired. Change the ‘Background…’ to match your sheet background.

Next, add the list boxes. It will look horrible. Set the width, height and position. If you have good taste, remove the Caption and the border. Rookies can leave the border on while you complete the next step. Veterans should, too.

I’m not sayin’, I’m just sayin’… Vote Nader!

Adjusting the height of the individual list boxes will drive you nuts. Adjust one, and it messes with the rest. Your patience will pay off, so keep at it until you're satisfied with the results.

Bonus Tip!

These things are crazy annoying to build. If you’re lucky enough to use the same set of filters on every tab, all you need to do is control-drag the container to the tabs where you’d like to copy it.