I’m working on a hobby project of building a “Mathematics applied to Finance” course. That means using a spreadsheet to build basic business finance scenarios without using any functions but formulas with the typical addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division operations. Yes, old school.
As I was working on the spreadsheet with some examples, I decided to use a monospace font, Roboto Mono, only in the cells with numbers.
Oh, what a nice surprise in terms of legibility. Then, I started to compare big blocks of cells with monospaced content and other cells with traditional sans fonts, e.g. Arial. And I had a mix of numbers and textual labels this time.
The difference, at least for me, was substantial. The ease of reading and reduced cognitive load was something I could really feel. The more monospaced cells I had on the screen, the easier I could find things left and right. And this is important when working on spreadsheets, as your eyes are always scanning the screen in all four directions.
From now on, as soon as I get my hands on a new spreadsheet I own, I’ll change its font to monospace.