Google Sheets is increasingly becoming my go to tool in game design. It is a great way to get an overview of your game data, do quick changes and calculate on balance. But sometimes it can be too crowded to get a quick overview. Sometimes it can be nice to get a visual aid to indicate when row of a new type of cards starts or see how many positive versus negative effects you got. And to do this there is a little trick called “Conditional formatting” found in the menu under “Format”. This let you select a text, word og value to look for in your cells that you then can define a special color styling for.

In this mini video example I show how I use it to mark different resources, and that way I can quickly see which type of resources I use the most.