Did you know you can use Emojis on the sheet tabs? The font on sheet tabs is small, so some emojis may not be that effective, but simple emojis can be.
In a reporting model you might need to update multiple sheets to complete the file. If there are a lot of input sheets it might be hard to keep track of where you are up to.
I typically use tab colours to track the status of a sheet. Green means done. Orange means in progress or needs review. Yellow requires input. Red is used for a warning.
This colour coding works for me as I am not colour blind. But red and green are problematic for people who are colour blind (its mainly men).
I thought that emojis in sheet names could make identifying sheet status easier.
Also combining them with a custom function that extracts sheet names could make centralising a sheet status list easier.
To insert an emoji in a sheet tab double click the sheet tab name and position the cursor where you want the emoji and then press the Windows key and the full stop.
This opens the emoji dialog.
Simple example
In the image below I have 5 data sheets that require input. Two have been done and are ticked. Two are not started and have a cross. The fifth is in process and has a minus sign.
In the Control sheet I have a list of the all the data sheet names.
Cell A1 has the custom function fnSHEEETNAME. This function extracts the sheet name from a cell reference in the sheet. The LAMBDA formula for the sheet name function is shown below.
=LAMBDA(ref,TEXTAFTER(CELL(“filename”,ref),”]”))
If you are unfamiliar with custom functions, check out the link below.
As you can see the list is easy to review.
By adding the HYPERLINK function (see image below) we can also link directly to each sheet.
Alternative
You could just use a tick and dash. No emoji could mean that sheet hasn’t been started.
The downside with using emojis is that to reset all the sheets you will need to change the last character back to a cross or remove it. This is a manual and time-consuming task. At least with tab colour it is easy to change a group of sheet tabs to the same colour.
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