Hey, welcome back to the Mr. Excel net cast. I’m Bill Jelen, amazing! We start out with massive amounts of data and how we’re going to analyze this. Well, let’—and see if we can solve this problem.
Welcome back to the Mr. Excel net cast, I’m Bill Jelen. A product review today, there’s a fellow named Erick Spiekermann. Erik is famous for information design and I have his book, Stop Stealing Sheep, and I even have seen Erick speak when he was speaking at the University of Akron and I’ve got—well, lets face it, I got spun the other day announcing that there was a brand new font that was designed for excel. A font designed by excel and I have probably would have click delete but I saw this designed by this fellow named Erik Spiekermann. So, I’ve took a look and checked it out. Erik has designed a font that is designed to be very eligible in his spreadsheet both when as printed and when its displayed. They have something that is narrow you know their point is there’s a lot of cells that contain text. Usually, that text tends to stretch things out. There’s no room for 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 from Erick Spiekermann. I’ve been using it now for a couple of days.
The one thing that I really like about it is the zeros or slash which reminds me of the old, old CRT screens that have back in the early to mid 80. But in general, I kind of like the thought. Now, I did some test here and they say that it is narrow while still being readable. The copy form this indicated Arial Narrow is very narrow but harder to read and so I took the words testing one, two, three and used the format, column auto fit selection and a variety of fonts, Arial narrow.
Calibri which is the excel 2007 font, times new roman font that I used most often and then here’s axel and axel small caps, you’ll see this one words that are 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 and times new roman or Arial narrow but as far as readability well that's up to you to check it out.
Well, they had an introductory special at fontshop.com. We got a funshop.com and search for axel. You 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 heavy spreadsheet user, you can buy that and then license for up to five computer so maybe the accounting department get a set. Everyone can try it out and see how it works.
Now, if you that you like this then of course what you’re going to 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 the excel options your going to come back here to the popular options and a I use this font and change that from body font to axe, I’ll 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 want to thank you for stopping by and we’ll see you next time for another net cast from Mr. Excel.
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