![]() ![]() However, these are awkward to press because you have to jump back and forth between them with your cursor. To stay true to the original game, I put the horizontal checkbox buttons on the left side and the vertical controls on the right side. Remove gridlines (one of the best tips to make your Sheets look good!)Īnd there you have it! Improvements Alternative Controls.Add a heading, in a playful gold-colored font.Add a thick red background around the outside of the Etch A Sheet.Merge a big section of cells for the sparkline area.There are a few other steps to complete the Etch A Sheet: The grouped row button below the Etch A Sheet board shows and hides the instructions section when it is toggled: I’ve used the same technique for the “Formulas” section, shown in the GIF above. This is another interesting technique, used here to show or hide content that doesn’t need to be on display all the time. I also set min and max values for the canvas, so that the drawing always starts from the bottom left. In the sparkline options, I’ve set the linewidth to 2 so it stands out more. Here, the sparkline formula takes the X Number and Y Number coordinates (two columns of numbers) and simply plots them as a line. The checkbox in cell H30 is the reset checkbox and I’ve called it “reset” in the named ranges box. The buttons are regular checkboxes, which toggle a TRUE/FALSE value in the cell. There’s a button to open up the right side of the Sheet and see the formulas that generate coordinates for the sparkline function: Since you can’t “shake” a Google Sheet ( although I bet you wish you could sometimes!), there’s an additional reset checkbox to clear out the image and put the stylus back to the bottom left corner. Just like the real Etch A Sketch game, there are controls to move the stylus left or right and up or down, to create lineographic images. So thank you, Tyler, for your amazing work! How Does Etch A Sheet Work? This Etch A Sheet game uses Tyler’s checkboxes as a button technique, and has similar logic to his moving-a-character-around-a-Sheet game. Thankfully, he hasn’t built an Etch A Sketch clone yet □ Tyler Robertson is a Google Sheets wizard who’s built an amazing portfolio of spreadsheet games (described by some as the Sistine Chapel for spreadsheets) using only built-in formulas. In fact, it’s created entirely with the native built-in functions of Google Sheets.īefore I dive in though, I want to acknowledge a fellow Google Sheets aficionado… Hat Tip To Tyler Robertson ![]() Dynamic array, or spill, formulas to generate coordinates.Self-referencing formulas with iterative calculations.□ Grab your own copy of the template at the bottom of this article. Sitting in my office later that day I had a crazy thought “Could I build a working Etch A Sketch in Google Sheets?” I was playing with my children the other day when one of them grabbed our Etch A Sketch toy and started drawing a treasure map with it. ![]()
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