Using a spreadsheet to chart stranded knitting patterns

I spent a long time looking for a coloured knitting program and tried a few and found them pretty slow to use, so I've put together a video on how to set up conditional formatting in google sheets (or any spreadsheet software) to plan out coloured knitting charts! I hope it might be helpful & useful for some people.

It's not always neccesary to have to chart out pattern and colour but for this particular project I'm working on I found it important because
a) I don't get a lot of time to knit so when I do I want to make sure I don't have to frog it because I chose the wrong colour
b) I have limited amounts of some of the colours and I wanted to make sure I balanced the design so they didn't run out
c) I wanted to make sure the colours harmonised and balanced out across the whole hat to make it coherant and beautiful!
d) I wanted to mix in some custom designs- the cows, my dog and the chickens

The video goes through how to
set up the spreadsheet into a knitting chart
set your conditional formatting rules
choose custom colours for your chart
change pattern colours quickly and easily
change the colour of specific areas of patterns after you have inputted them
copy your repeat across the whole chart in about 3 seconds - no copy and paste!
duplicate the file so you can save a colourway and start working on another one instantly

For some fantastic fair isle patterns to use please consider joining the Fair Isle Fisherman's Kep facebook page and purchasing Anne Sinclair's kep pattern. All proceeds from pattern sales go to the Fair Isle museum. I am a complete novice at knitting but I am now addicted, and the group is extremely friendly and supportive! There are loads of beautiful fair isle motifs to follow and use when you are charting and combining those with this tutorial you can come up a design for a stunning and unique fisherman's kep in half an hour!