Erik Spiekerman has designed a font that is ideal for use in Excel. The Axel font is designed to be narrow yet highly readable both on screen and on paper. In Episode 1054, we will take a look at the Axel font.
This blog is the video podcast companion to the book, Learn Excel 97-2007 from MrExcel. Download a new two minute video every workday to learn one of the 377 tips from the book!
This blog is the video podcast companion to the book, Learn Excel 97-2007 from MrExcel. Download a new two minute video every workday to learn one of the 377 tips from the book!
Transcript of the video:
Hey, welcome back to the MrExcel netcast.
I'm Bill Jelen.
Basically, we start out with massive amount of data.
How we are gonna analyze as well. Let's fire up a pivot table.
And see if we can solve this problem.
Welcome back to the MrExcel netcast.
I'm Bill Jelen.
Got a product review today, there's a fellow named Eric speaker man.
Eric is famous for information design, and I have his book stopped stealing sheep, and I even have seen Eric speak, when he was speaking at The University of Akron, and I got...
Well, it's basically, I got spam the other day announcing that there was a brand new font that was designed for Excel, a font designed by Excel and I probably would have clicked delete, but, I saw that was designed by this fellow named Eric speaker man.
So, I took a look and checked it out Eric has designed a font, that is designed to be very legible in a spreadsheet both when it is printed, and when it's displayed.
They have something that is narrow, you know, the point is there's a lot of cells that contain text.
Usually, that text attempts to stretch things out, there's not room for it in the columns, your columns are unduly wide.
And so, what we're looking at here is.
We're looking at this new font called Axel, Axel from Eric speaker man.
I've been using it now for a couple of days, the one thing that I really like about it is the zeros are slashed, which reminds me of the old, old CRT screens that we had back in the you know, the early to mid 80's.
But, in general I kind of like the font, Now I did some tests here, they say that it is narrow while still being readable.
The copy from the spam indicated arial narrow is very narrow.
But, harder to read and so I took the words, Testing 1,2,3 and used format column auto fit selection in a variety of fonts Arial Narrow, Calibri, which is the excel 2007 font.
Times New Roman, the font that I used most often and then here's Axel and Axel small caps you'll see this one.
Where instead of having lower case letters, they have small caps.
And then finally, Arial, which had been the default font before excel 2007, and while Arial takes 14.14 to make that.
Axel is narrower 13.14.
But, certainly not as narrow as, Calibri, Times New Roman or Arial Narrow.
But as far as readability, well, you know, that's up to you to check it out.
Now, they had an introductory special at fontshop.com.
So, if you gotta fontshop.com and search for Axel, you can get all four fonts that's the small caps font, the regular font and then bold versions of both.
And check it out if you're a heavy spreadsheet user.
You can buy that and then license it for up to five computers.
So, maybe, the accounting department can get a set, everyone can try it out, see how it works now.
If you decide that you like this, then of course what you're going to do, you want to do is set it up as the default.
So, we go to the office button and then Excel Options, once we're in excel options you're going to come back here to the Popular option and say, Use this font, change that from Body Font to Axel.
Do that and we'll check it out here over the next week of podcast and see how we like the Axel font.
There you have it.
I wanna thank you for stopping by.
See you next time for another netcast from MrExcel.
Well, thanks for stopping by.
See you next time for another netcast form MrExcel.
I'm Bill Jelen.
Basically, we start out with massive amount of data.
How we are gonna analyze as well. Let's fire up a pivot table.
And see if we can solve this problem.
Welcome back to the MrExcel netcast.
I'm Bill Jelen.
Got a product review today, there's a fellow named Eric speaker man.
Eric is famous for information design, and I have his book stopped stealing sheep, and I even have seen Eric speak, when he was speaking at The University of Akron, and I got...
Well, it's basically, I got spam the other day announcing that there was a brand new font that was designed for Excel, a font designed by Excel and I probably would have clicked delete, but, I saw that was designed by this fellow named Eric speaker man.
So, I took a look and checked it out Eric has designed a font, that is designed to be very legible in a spreadsheet both when it is printed, and when it's displayed.
They have something that is narrow, you know, the point is there's a lot of cells that contain text.
Usually, that text attempts to stretch things out, there's not room for it in the columns, your columns are unduly wide.
And so, what we're looking at here is.
We're looking at this new font called Axel, Axel from Eric speaker man.
I've been using it now for a couple of days, the one thing that I really like about it is the zeros are slashed, which reminds me of the old, old CRT screens that we had back in the you know, the early to mid 80's.
But, in general I kind of like the font, Now I did some tests here, they say that it is narrow while still being readable.
The copy from the spam indicated arial narrow is very narrow.
But, harder to read and so I took the words, Testing 1,2,3 and used format column auto fit selection in a variety of fonts Arial Narrow, Calibri, which is the excel 2007 font.
Times New Roman, the font that I used most often and then here's Axel and Axel small caps you'll see this one.
Where instead of having lower case letters, they have small caps.
And then finally, Arial, which had been the default font before excel 2007, and while Arial takes 14.14 to make that.
Axel is narrower 13.14.
But, certainly not as narrow as, Calibri, Times New Roman or Arial Narrow.
But as far as readability, well, you know, that's up to you to check it out.
Now, they had an introductory special at fontshop.com.
So, if you gotta fontshop.com and search for Axel, you can get all four fonts that's the small caps font, the regular font and then bold versions of both.
And check it out if you're a heavy spreadsheet user.
You can buy that and then license it for up to five computers.
So, maybe, the accounting department can get a set, everyone can try it out, see how it works now.
If you decide that you like this, then of course what you're going to do, you want to do is set it up as the default.
So, we go to the office button and then Excel Options, once we're in excel options you're going to come back here to the Popular option and say, Use this font, change that from Body Font to Axel.
Do that and we'll check it out here over the next week of podcast and see how we like the Axel font.
There you have it.
I wanna thank you for stopping by.
See you next time for another netcast from MrExcel.
Well, thanks for stopping by.
See you next time for another netcast form MrExcel.
