Add Filters and a Custom Rating Scale

In the last lesson, you started an area guide that includes information, or data, about places to visit in an area.

You built your guide in a spreadsheet, which allows you to organize different types of data about each place.

In this lesson, you will add a rating scale to your guide and practice personalizing how you view the data.

Rating locations in your guide gives you an opportunity to communicate the locations that are most important or interesting to you.

This can give your audience another way to compare locations and advice so they can prioritize which ones they want to visit.

You can create a rating system using data validation.

"Data validation" allows you to create rules that limit what can be entered in a particular cell.

For example, in your area guide you might create a data validation rule for your rating column that only allows three ratings like: can't miss, worth a visit, or If you have time.

Then if you enter a different rating, such as so so, it will signal that this is not an accepted rating.

Adding data validation can help you communicate clearly and consistently, as well as save you time.

Instead of typing the same text repeatedly you can simply select the correct option from a dropdown menu.

In this lesson, you will: Add a scale to rate your locations, and practice sorting and filtering the information in your guide.

To start, navigate to Google Drive, find your area guide spreadsheet, and open it.

Now, it's your turn: Open your area guide.