Creating wireframes in excel

Every information architect needs a tool to document her thoughts into a set of tangible wireframes. While a pencil and paper may serve the basic purpose, as a consultant, you are definitely expected to provide a deliverable slightly more professional than the rough paper sketches, that most of the time only you can understand.

I started making wireframes using word, though I remember doing my very first project in visio. I was never too good with word, pathetic actually. My tables would routinely crash, textboxes would float all over the place and the stylesheets and auto numbering was a nightmare!

So regrettably, rather than concentrating on the design, I was putting more effort trying to understand the medium. Colleagues offered to share their tips and tricks, but each of them had a set of whimsical rules that seemed to work only for them, never for me.
There was a time when I had developed a phobia for creating wireframes, I was ashamed of how disgusting my work looked.
At around this time, I happened to drop by a colleague with some great design ideas that I had for a project we were working together on. He offered to wireframe the ideas for me, and...he started excel.

The first thing was to select the entire sheet, by clicking the top left corner and filling the sheet with white color. As good as a blank drawing sheet.

Step 2 was to break each label, each field element into a textbox. With borders, without borders, fill effects, gradients and voila! you have a wireframe that looks as good as the design idea that its supposed to convey!

Ever since, I have been hooked on to the idea of using excel to create wireframes and it has certainly made my life easier. The field elements don't tend to go awry as they do in word, the application is definitely more robust, you have a decent canvas to draw up your wireframe and with a little bit of playing around, there's nothing you cannot do.

Oh, and did I mention the copy-paste of images that is such a pain in word is a breeze in excel. Your image will get pasted at the exact same spot that you wanted it to be pasted - again, unlike word, which sometimes seems to get a mind of its own.
And here's the best part. You never have to worry about indexes and tables - just color-code the tabs on the worksheet and you wont have to scroll up and down between a 300-page document!

Happy wireframing in excel, everyone!