Follow our advice to beautify your budgets and spruce up your spreadsheets

You, like us, have probably watched the Apple adverts that show the magic of a Mac and its iWork apps and felt suitably proud to be part of the club. You then come to use those apps and find yourself creating a hideous-looking document that doesn’t quite look like those beautifully polished works of art you’ve seen on TV and the web. While Apple’s apps are certainly easy to use, making the end product look as remarkable as you would like is a little more of a challenge.

This scenario is never truer than in iWork’s Numbers, an app that offers all the power of Microsoft Excel but with the ease of use you’ve come to expect from Mac software. While the standard templates can help you add a little flair to otherwise boring documents, you sometimes want to start from scratch. This is where things can tend to turn ugly. Building a project in Numbers often requires you to pull together spreadsheet data, charts, text and images, and the combination can soon come to look a little messy.

In this tutorial we’re going to start with just such a messy document, the kind you would end up with if you aimed to make a useful spreadsheet but paid no attention to its looks. From here we’re going to perform a bit of a makeover using fonts, colors and shapes to bring all our elements together in a tidy and coherent manner. From tweaking default font and spreadsheet styles to adjusting your charts and adding background shapes – when you’re done following our advice you’ll have no excuse not to produce delicious-looking documents.

Start by launching any existing Numbers document and we’ll show you how to turn it into one that would sit nicely among those created by Apple’s marketing team. Trust us, it’s not as hard as it looks!

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Brighten Up Your Numbers Sheets

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  Start with the Fonts

  Our document uses the very dull and system-like Arial as a default font. While this is fine for data, we want something a bit more fun for headings. Select each and pick a new font from the menu bar. Here we are using Handwriting Dakota.

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  Text Backgrounds

  So we’re not left with floating headings in our document, we’ve now added shapes behind each. Create a shape from the Shapes menu and position it over the text, then select Arrange > Send to Back. You can also adjust the color or add a frame from the Inspector.

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  More Shapes

  For each section of our document (the data, the pie chart and the pictures) we are now going to add a background shape to help define them. Follow the same process as in step 2 to drop in shapes, adjust them and position them behind other elements.

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  Shadow Boxing

  To give a little more depth to the boxes we’ve created and further define the sections of our document, we’re also adding shadows. Select each shape in turn or all of them at once and use the Inspector’s Object pane to set the amount of shadow you want to show.

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  Border Control

  To completely tie all the elements of our document together, we’re going to add a border around the entire collection. This is done by adding a large rectangular shape over the entire document and moving it to the back. Again, use the Inspector to add a Picture Frame or stroke.

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  Special Spreadsheets

  Match the tone of your overall document by clicking on a spreadsheet and selecting a new style from the Styles menu. Here we have added a beige design and then used the Inspector pane to change the fill to None so our background color shows through.

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  Chart Topping

  There is a wide range of chart styles available in Numbers and you can adjust yours to better suit your design. Click on the chart and then select a new design from the Inspector’s Chart tab. You can also change the colors by clicking the Chart Colors button.

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  Exploding Pieces

  Also available from the Inspector’s Charts tab is the option to further segment or "explode" individual wedges of a chart, or the entire thing. To do so, click on the whole chart or one or more wedges and use the Explode slider to move them in or out.

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  Quick Tip

  To add images, head to the Media pane, pick some from iPhoto and drag them to your document. You can then resize them and use the Inspector to add a frame to them. You can even rotate images – hold command and click-drag any corner to do so.

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