I’m back today with more tips and tricks to make Google Sheets fun and amazing.
Filter by Color
If you have set up your sheet to change colors using conditional formatting (Fun With Sheets 2), then you can filter by color to see entries that are a certain color.
Highlight the cells you want to sort, then select the funnel looking tool on the right of the toolbar. Select Create new filter view.
The view changes and these little upside down triangles show up on the first line.
I’m going to click the triangle on House to filter.
I selected dark red 1 to get my Gryffindor students.
*Note that you can also filter by text color if you prefer colored text instead of colored cells.
A now I have just my Gryffindor students.
Hiding Cells/Sheet
If you’ve been following along with the Google Sheets activities I’ve been creating, then you may already know these tricks. I use them in my activities all the time.
Hiding Cells
Sometimes you don’t want part of your cells to show. Maybe you have some calculations happening, maybe some answers. You can hide those sheets so students can’t see them. Now, a tech savvy student might notice, but we will get to that in the next step.
Highlight the rows you want to hide (works for columns too), right click and select hide rows.
Once the rows (or columns) are hidden, you can see the arrows indicating there are hidden cells.
Hide Sheet
You can also hide an entire sheet from view. If you create an activity and put the images and answers on Sheet 2, you don’t want students to be able to see that.
Once the sheet is ready, right click and hide sheet.
Protect Cells/Sheets
Once you have hidden your cells and sheets, you want to prevent tech savvy students from unhiding them. You can protect these so you are the only person with access.
Highlight the cells you want to protect, right click, and select protect range.
You can do the same thing with the sheet, by right clicking on the sheet and setting protection.
The only caveat with this is once a student makes a copy, like they have to do when they solve a puzzle, the YOU in “only you can make a change” is THEM. So they can now see your Sheet 2 and hidden cells if they know how to unhide. For this reason, I like to make my font color white so it disappears and I place the answers where they have to scroll a lot to find them. Is it perfect? No. But these activities are fun and work well for digital escape rooms or review so I will continue to make them.
I hope this series is helping you embrace the amazingness that is Google Sheets!
See previous Fund with Google Sheets posts:
Infinitely Teaching 