 In this video, you'll learn how to create this customer journey map using Google Sheets or something similar like Excel. I'm going to show you step by step how to get there. And we're also going to look at how Google Sheets and Excel stack up against professional journey mapping tools. I think you're going to be surprised, at least I was. That's what's coming up. Let the show begin. Hi, I'm Mark and welcome to the service design show. My goal with this show is to empower you with the most effective skills and strategies so you can design services that win the hearts of people and business. And a key tool in our tool set is of course the customer journey map. I've been reviewing customer journey mapping tools for quite a while now. If you want to see the entire overview, check out this playlist over here and we're going to check out a new tool in this video. The best tool is often the one that you have at your disposal. You might not have access to professional journey mapping tools like Custulence or Smappley or you don't have time to go through the learning curve. Well, I'd argue that Google Sheets and Excel are so ubiquitous that almost everyone has access to them and knows at least a little bit on how to use them. Of course, Google Sheets and Excel aren't dedicated journey mapping tools, but neither is Miro or Miro and I've reviewed them as well. And I know people who can do magic in Excel, so why not give it a try? In the past, I've been quite skeptical about using Google Sheets and Excel to create journey maps, but hey, let's see how that holds true. This is going to be quite a long video because we're going to create the journey map step by step and I'm going to show you every step that I take. If you want to skip forward to a specific section, you can find all the timestamps in the video description or just use the chapter markers here in the player. You'll get a lot of details in this video, but there are three main sections. In the first section, we're going to create the basic structure of a journey map. So creating lanes, creating a curved line, adding data. In the second section, we're going to use more of the advanced features, see how we can use the journey map on a day-to-day basis, looking at collaboration, accountability and sharing the map. And in the third section, we're going to review Google Sheets and Excel and see how it stacks up against professional journey mapping tools. When would it be a good moment to use Google Sheets? When would it be a better moment to use a different tool? So those are the three main areas. And what's really important to know is that this isn't a video about how to create the perfect journey map. This video is about exploring the tool. If you want to know what a customer journey map is and what the right structure is, just check out this video because that tells you all about that. So let's dive right in. Let me share my screen and let's start this process of building an awesome journey map using Google Sheets. Now the end result that we're going to end up with is something similar to what you see over here. Now I'm using Google Sheets, but this probably quite easily translates to using Excel as well. So don't get hung up on Google Sheets here. And the first step that we need to do is to create a blank sheet. And that's what we have over here. For this example, we're going to create the mother of all maps, which means the most basic customer journey map structure that you can imagine. This includes four lanes and I've reviewed it in the previous tool reviews as well. So we're going to stick to that here. Now let's close the final result and let's start with the journey map over here. Now which journey should we map? And in the previous tool reviews, we went ahead and created a journey for going to the zoo. And that's what we're going to map here as well. Okay, so creating lanes, that's I think the most simple thing we can do in Google Sheets. That's what the entire tool was made for. So let's start with that. We have four lanes and let's use the top row for the title of our journey map. And that's going to the zoo. Let's change it. Let's go into the zoo. Now the first lane, the top lane that we want to have is customer stages or maybe server stages, stages in general. And then the next one is customer activities. The next one will be customer needs and the final one will be customer emotions. Okay, so to make this already look a little bit better, I'm going to change my default for the default font from their entire sheet to leto. I like that font a little bit better. Now the next thing we want to do is make sure that our different lanes stand out a bit more. Let's give the title a different background color. Let's make it like that. Let's give our stage a different background color. Let's start using bluish. Let's give customer activities a different background color. We're going to create something like this. And this is, I think, it could take a little bit of time to get the right color palette that you want, but for the sake of this example, this is good enough. This doesn't look anything like the journey map we want to create, but hang in there, we're going to get there. So what I would like to do next is get away from the Excel feeling. So I'm going to go to view and then hide grid lines. Okay, that already feels a little less like an Excel sheet. Now I'm going to show you a trick, which I really recommend you do as well. We have four lanes here, and I would add one lane below each lane. And this is going to be our separator lane. As you'll see, this will come in very handy later. And we're going to do the same with our columns. So we're going to have a separator column. I'm going to resize this one. Let's see where it's resized. Here is resized. I'm going to set it to something like 20. And then usually it's useful to have this one, for instance, like even a little lighter color. So let's make it a little bit lighter. And you'll see in a moment why this is, why you'd want to do this a little bit lighter. And this is going to be very, very useful. So I'm going to create custom colors. Of course, you can use the custom colors of your brand here, so that everybody in the organizations understands what they need to do. Okay, so I'm going to copy these columns. And I'm going to paste them here. I'm going to make this also resize to 20. And these are going to be my separator columns. Now, next I'm going to do is to make sure that I can scroll like this. So I'm going to, now I can make the map as long as I want. And then the journey will stay over here. So as you see, customer stage activities, they don't line up really nicely. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to make sure that they are split up over two lines. And that will look better. And again, we're going to this step by step. So these are the very basics that you need to do to make your map stand out a little bit. And what I like to do, customer stages, let's call this phases. That's, I like that better. Phases and then customer activities needs, I'm going just to highlight that. Now, these rows are really small. Let's give them a little bit of breeding room. So let's select this row, this row, I'm holding on to option and then clicking on my Mac. And then let's, let's do that again. Everything click, resize, selected rows and let's make them 100. That's, well, that's, that's a bit much. Let's make them, let's make them about, I think about, what would be nice, 60. Let's use 60 for now. And then these fonts can be definitely a bit bigger. So let's make them, for now, let's, let's make them 18, this might be a big, big 14. And then I'm going to give a little bit of breeding. Okay. So really, we're at the start of creating our journey method. Now, what's next? The title, we can make the title, of course, a bit bigger. And what I would recommend is making the title bigger, making it bold. Let's make it stand out. Let's make it 14. Let's give it a little bit of breeding room. Great. The next thing we want to do, what I would like to do is to add about which customer segment, customer profile, this journey as, because you might have different customers. So let's add customer segment. And that could be something like excited that let's, let's make it the over excited. That and let's add an emoji to this. I don't know. This looks like an over excited that and we're going to make this bold. Now, you see that this is running over myself. That's okay. We're going to fix that in a moment. But at least you could link this to an empathy map that you have or hero canvas or persona that would be really useful. Now, the next thing we need to do is to add some data to our journey map. We have the lanes, but we don't have any information in the lane. So let's start with the phases and let's keep it really simple for the sake of this example. Let's say we just have three phases in our journey is before. And now I would like to have a during stage, but how am I going to add that? Let me show you. That's why we have the separator cell. I would copy this and just paste it over here. And then of course, we don't want our customer segment here. And I would paste it again. Of course, we don't want that here and before during and after. And I would like to have this aligned with in the middle of our cell, something like that. And what we could do now is we could potentially merge these cells here so that customer segment is on the right level. But again, this is good enough for now. If you want to add more separation and more clarity between the lanes, you could add borders. But using borders, my experience is that that often leads to quite a few challenges in Google Sheets. So I added the top border here. You can see the line going there. It can be useful, but just keep in mind that this might lead to quite a bit of fiddling when you start adding cells. But it can be visually more interesting. Let's add one border here. Okay, great. We have our borders done. So what's next? Next up is, of course, adding data to our journey. We would call this cards or information cards. And let's dive into customer activities and see if we can start adding stuff there. So I'm going to make my phases on bold and I'm going to make this one middle aligned. So the lines with the other things looks a bit better. Now, customer activities in the before stage when going to the zoo, it could be something like buy tickets. Okay. And how do I add another activity? Because there might be something like driving to the zoo. Well, in this case, I would just insert one column and you see we have our separator lane, which does, which makes it quite clear that this is a new cell. And I would like to fix my alignment. I like my alignment to be horizontal and vertical horizontal. So let's say drive to the zoo and let's add an icon of our car. Drive to the zoo and that seems to be the perfect icon. Okay. And now you see that my cell is a little bit too small. So what I can easily do is I can either just pull and stretch or I could resize this column. And now you see that before is here on the left side, but before spans across these two activities. So what I would do is to go and merge this cell. Now you can see that before is about buying tickets and driving to the zoo. If you'd like, you could, if you want to have a separation between these two activities, you could go into borders again and then pick a good border color and then say, let's make it like that. And then you see a line, a very thin line appears here. Again, playing around with borders in Excel can be a bit tricky. So be mindful about that. If you really needed to do it, otherwise skip the borders. So is there anything else in the before? Let's add one more. And that could be parking. My customer activity is park the car. All right. Let's add some things to during, which could be validate ticket. And let's add one more in the during stage. Right. And that's could be feed the zebra. And in the after stage, share photo on social media. And as you see here, this cell doesn't align. The text runs over the cell. There's a really easy trick here, text wrapping. And this already looks okay. All right. It's a good start. Again, with the during stage, I would merge the cells. And as you see in the before stage, we need to merge this one as well. So that before is in the middle. And I think we're off to a good start with our journey map. Now let's also add a few things to customer needs, because there is one thing I want to show you, which is really cool in Google Sheets. Let's say in the customer needs, when I'm buying my tickets, the need that I have is confirmation that everything was processed. And again, it runs over the cell here, just set up to have this as text wrapping. And if I had done this even smarter, I would have set this up in my first cell. And then this would be applied to every other cell if I copy and paste this. But I didn't do that. I recommend that you do. So you can make sure that this is set up from the go. And that would be really smart. A very cool thing in Google Sheets is that you can add formatting inside the cell. So I can underline things. I can say, I want to have things bold. So we can really highlight stuff. Let's say drive to the zoo, it's about my need, it's about building excitement. We can add a party thing here. And then again, the text wrapping. One more thing, let's say we're driving to the zoo and there are multiple needs in here. So what would I do? Would I make a list like this? That could work, but I don't think that's the smartest way. What's probably better is to add another column and to add, I don't know, building a piece of mind or something like that about being on time, something like that. And then again, I would just merge these cells. That driving to the zoo is about these two things. And now you might think, okay, I want to add another border and then you have the border over there. Yeah, so this looks good. One more thing I want to show you here is let's say park the car. I want to have clear navigation so I don't get lost. And a really cool thing in Google Sheets that you can do is you can say, for instance, navigation, I want that to be a link to somewhere. And let's say Google Maps, Google Maps, there we go, apply, there we go. And there's a link. So we can add formatting within the cells, including links, which is pretty awesome. Now, if we move on to the next lane, which is customer emotion, this is the stereo typical and iconic lane for customer journey map. It's the curved line that shows how somebody is experiencing the map. By the way, let me just zoom in so that we can see things a little bit better. There we go. So how do we create customer emotion line? There are two ways you can do that. The first way I'm going to show you both is by inserting and drawing. And then you can create, take a line and we want a curved line. And then we're going to do it like this, this, this, this and double click to save a close. And then we get a nice line and then we would be able to, I don't know, line it up. We can resize, stretch it. This could work. You can also edit the points here like this, but it's not ideal. There is much better way you can do this. So the better way to do this is by adding a few more lanes. Let's do that. Let's start by one below. Now, this is a little bit too big. I want to have the row smaller. Let's say I want to have it 30 half of this and I want to have a different background color. And I'll show you in a minute why I would like to do that. So fill color. Let's add a fill color, which is quite light, something like that. And then also do it for these cells. And I think it was this one here. And one more. So now I have one, but what I want is to have five in total. So I'm going to speed this up and create four other lanes below. Okay, so now I've got five empty lanes here. I still find them a little bit too big. So I'm going to resize them. And we're going to let's resize them to 20. I think that should be fine. So what you see often with customer emotions is that they go from very happy or very satisfied to not satisfied. So what I would do here is I would just add an emoji like happy at the top. And I would middle align everything. Let's middle align. And I would add in the middle one, I would add an emoji, which is like, I'm okay, like this one. And in the bottom emoji, I would add angry one. And now we need to have make them a little bit smaller. So they fit in our cell. There we go. Okay, great. Now how do we visualize the curved line? Because we just have cells over here. That's a really good question. And I'm going to show you a really smart and simple trick. And the trick is to just use a background color. So for instance, when we're unsatisfied, we could use a very red background color. And if we're very happy, then we would use a green color. So you see around buying tickets, that's, I don't know, somehow I'm very unsatisfied and about building excitement and driving to the zoo. I'm very happy. Now you could do this manually and then a graph starts to appear. But there is a really neat trick you can do to make this easier and automatic. And this is a bit of an advanced trick, but I'm going to show you. Anyway, let's reset this. So we're going to use a thing called conditional formatting. If you have never used it before, don't worry, it's really simple. So we go to background color, then go to conditional formatting. And then we're going to select a single color and not when it's not empty, but when text contains and then just a space bar, just press the space and then select green color. So what happens now is when I, in this cell, when I would just press space bar, hey, it's green. So I'm going to set this up for the other cells as well. Again, I'll fast forward so you don't have to sit through all this. Okay, so we're back. I've set up the conditional rules for all the other cells. Let me show you how they are set up. So I've changed this top one to include a longer range. And this range makes sure that it applies across all the other cells. And I've added this for the other cells below as well. So what you can do now is just press space bar in one of those cells and then a line starts to appear. There we go. And if we zoom out a little bit, we have an emotional curve. And if we want to change it, it's quite easy. We just add a space bar somewhere. So this is a really smart and simple and effective way to add an emotional curve without having to actually draw anything in Google Sheets. The next thing I want to show you here is a very important part of a customer journey map. And that is to evoke empathy, to tell a story. The danger we have is that a customer journey map in Excel or Google Sheets will be quite left brain. It's not telling a visual story. So how do we add a visual layer, an empathy layer to our journey map? There are a few ways. Of course, adding emoticons like I already showed is a good start. Let's add the emoticon of a ticket. There we go. It already adds a little bit of flavor, but what really adds flavor is photos. So let me show you how to add photos here. Let's say we want to make customer activities a bit more lively. Let's say we have done research and we have research data about these customer activities. We know what the people are doing and have some evidence. I would add a new lane here. And again, I would make this give it a little bit of a lighter color. So let's add a super light color here. Maybe even lighter, but any who is up to you to decide which colors you want. Make this light. And now you'll also see the benefit of having the separator lane that we created at the start. So this lane stays at the bottom. So we have a clear separation between customer activities and customer needs. And we don't have to mess around with borders. But as you see the borders between the customer activities, I would have to add them again. And this can become comparison. So be mindful about borders. If you like, you might also add separator lanes between the activities. But again, this might become comparison. Let's go back to adding photos. Let's say we have a photo of parking your car because we did our research over there and we have some research data. Now how do we add a photo here? You can go to insert and then image and then image over cell. And you have a few options. You can upload your own research data photos. Or if we're making an assumption based journey map, we might use Google search. And let's see. Park parking zoo park. Is that do we have a photo at a parking zoo? What do you know? Awesome. And let's insert that. And we inserted over the cell. So it's going to create something like this. And yeah, that's, that works, but it really doesn't. So there's a better way. What we can do is go to insert and then image and then in the cell. And let's do it again. Parking zoo parking zoo. Let's add the same photo, insert. And now as you'll see, it's in our cell. The only challenge is that it's quite small and you cannot make it bigger unless you resize the cell. I haven't found a way to make this pop up. Maybe there is, maybe there isn't, but that's the only downside. What I would really recommend is rather than using Google image search and you have to be mindful about copyrights there. Just use your own research data. If you have made sketches about these situations, if you have done design research, just add that data over here and bring your map to life. The other thing that I also already showed you is using links. And I think even Google gives a preview so you could link to specific images. And I think if you hover over that, you could get a preview. So using link is the other option. Emoticons, images and links, those are options. You have to make your map visually a bit more attractive and to tell the story in a more engaging way. So let's move on in creating this journey map. A really useful feature in Google Sheets is grouping links. Now, you can imagine this is still quite a simple journey map, but when you start adding backstage layers, when you start adding stages, it will become quite big, quite fast, and it will be hard to navigate. And when it's too complex, you won't get any data out of this. So let's say we want to make this map a little bit smaller because we're dealing with a stakeholder who isn't interested in customer emotions at this moment. So what we could do is select these cells and then right click and then group these rows. And then we get an icon over here when we click that, there we go. We can shrink our map and we can do the same with this line. For instance, let's say we have more research data and we want to shrink that, we're just going to group these rows. And there you go. You can make a very compact map or you can make it bigger. And what's also nice is we're going to add a column here and let's call, let's give this, let's say an orange background and let's add a word in the top cell front, front stage. Let's say that this all relates to the front stage experience. Let's merge these cells and then there's an option to rotate our text. Let's, we want to have our text like this. We're going to make it smaller again. We're going to make our text white. So that's better to read. And then what we could do is we could take all these cells and group them as well. So we can have multiple groups and then we would, now this text disappears, that's easy to fix. But you can imagine that if you would have quite a big journey map, which let's say, let's add a backstage lane back. Let's copy this one. That's easier. Let's call this back stage where you have all the internal systems mapped and your map is becoming quite large. You could just simplify it by making groups. And whenever you need, you could open the backstage or open the front stage or have touch point lanes. You can make small big maps appear much more compact. So using groups is really smart and that works as well for the stages. So we could do something like this. Let's group the columns and I don't know when you would want to use this, because all the other things disappear over here. But let's say you want to expand on a certain section, that's the way to do it. So that's a pretty powerful feature in Google Sheets. One thing I want to add about grouping, if you feel that you need more than three subgroups, either at the lane level or the stages level, the phases level, your map is probably getting too complex and you might consider creating separate submaps. So yeah, if you have more than three groups, that's a red flag that you should probably make your map simpler and break it up into smaller chunks. So this looks already pretty good and it's pretty usable. You can quite easily expand this and make it bigger and add more data at research data. Now the next question becomes how useful is this on a day-to-day basis? Because this is great for a one-off map, but that's not what we're here to do. We're here to use maps to drive innovation and to make our organization more customer-centric. So we're going to have to look at some other features and let's dive into that. Now when you're going to use journey maps to drive innovation, use them on a day-to-day basis, the first thing that you need is being able to update and change the map, of course. And let's see how easy or hard that is in Google Sheets. Adding a new lane, let's say we want to add a lane below customer emotions, that's not really hard because this is what Google Sheets was made to do. So I'm just going to insert not seven rows, I just want one row below, let's see, run row below and then I would probably drag this to here. Now it complains that I have emerged a cell, so we would have to emerge this and then I would have to move this one over here and then I could give it a different color and then I could re-merge these cells. So adding a new lane, it's not that hard, let's go back to the previous state, but adding lanes is really what Google Sheets and Excel are made for. How about adding columns or stages? Well, we've done that already quite a few times, so let's say there's something in the journey stage that happens between validating the ticket and feeding the zebra. We would just click here and add one new column and voila, there we are, it's a new step. So that's super easy to do and let's say I want to reorganize this again, merged cells, that's this top one, you have to be mindful about that. But I can, it's not that hard to drag stuff around and change things. Dragging things around, changing it makes our life quite easy. So it's easy to add columns, to add lanes, to add rows. How about if we would like to change some things in our cards? Let's say these two things build excitement and having peace of mind about being on time, we want to change those too. So I cannot drag this one over the other one and then have them flip. We would have to use a simple cut and paste, I would just cut the text here, paste it over there. So this is a bit of manual labor, but nevertheless, not super complicated, easy to do. It just takes a little bit of time. So updating and changing the map, most features are pretty drag-and-drop and I think that's quite useful. Next thing we want to look at is the status in a map. Imagine that your map is a change plan, a change plan towards a more customer-centric organization. You want to see what's happening, what are people working on, what are we changing in our map. So how could we indicate that? Let's say parking the car and clear navigation is an area of focus where a team is working on. So how would we indicate that? Well, we have a few options. We could just change the background color to something like, I don't know, dark green, whatever we decide with our team. Then we see, hey, something is going on. We could make it red if this is or orange if this is something we want to remove from the map. So background color would be an option. Or we could use, again, go back to our borders, select the thick border and just add a thick border around the cell. So you get something like this or you can, of course, combine those two and you could make it red. I need to add a border. Let's add a red border so you see what happens. So you could visually identify in your map what is being worked on and what is changing in the customer journey. What are you updating? Let me remove the border. So one thing that's really important when you start working with status of things changing in your map, like the navigation, for instance, let's make it, again, give it a green background color, like you want to know what's going on here. You want to have something about accountability. And that's the next thing I want to investigate. So what do I mean with accountability? Well, basically, if you're working with a team, you want to see who has done what, who hasn't changed or updated the map in the last four weeks. You want to see who is making progress and who isn't. And luckily, this is very well baked in into Google Sheets. The option that we have for this is going to file and then a version history and then see a version history. And then this gives us all the changes done to the map, which are a lot in our case. You can have named versions, so you can name this to progress week 47 or something like that or update based on user research. And it gives you the names of the people who have worked on this. And it's insane, but it even works on a cell level. So let's say somebody is responsible for creating the customer needs lane. You could right click here on a cell and then show, edit history. And then you can see exactly who has done what in this cell. For any professional journey mapping tool, this is a killer feature. So I was already mentioning working with a team. So how do you collaborate on a journey map in Google Sheets? Well, the entire Google suite is built around collaboration and sharing. So it's no wonder that Google Sheets excels at this. No, fun intended. Actually, fun intended. So let's share this map. I would share it by going over here. And then I could share it with, well, let's not share it with Daniel. Let's share it with myself. And then I could say, I can edit, view, comment, which is pretty awesome. Let's say you want to share this with the HR department. And I could just give them the comment option and they have the backstage lane, which is Azure, something like that. And I could say, please comment only on this specific lane. Now, what's really important is I can also right click here. And let's see, get link to this range. Now, Google has given me a direct link to this specific range. So when I email my HR manager and say, can you look at this Google Sheet? No, this journey map and add your data in here. Like when the imagine that your map is super huge and somebody opens this and they are overwhelmed, they're not going to add anything to it. So sending them a link that directs them specifically to their lane increases the chance that they will contribute a lot. And you can link to lanes, like we said, but you can even link to direct cells. Let's see, where is it? Link, link, link, link, link. Get link to this cell. This is awesome. Imagine that somebody in sales department, you want them to review the buy tickets activity. You just get the link, get link to the cell. You send it to the sales department and you ask them, can you review this step in customer activities? Here's the direct link. That will take them to the specific activity. That's awesome. That's really going to increase the likelihood that people will engage and collaborate on this journey map. And another thing that's going to increase the chance of collaboration is the protect range feature. You might be wondering, what? And that's, let me show you. Let's say that we don't want people to mess around with the customer needs because we've researched that. We can say this is our protected range and only for, I don't know, only for UX department, set permissions. Who can edit this? Only me or I can say my team. Yes. And now, why is this so important? Again, imagine that we're sharing this map with the HR department. They might be scared to change stuff here, scared to mess things up. Of course, we've sent them the link to the HR department lane over here. But still, when they see this entire map, they might be wondering, oh, I'm not going to touch this. I might break things. Now, if you have protected the lanes and given the right permission to people, you can tell the HR department, one, if you change something, we can always go back because we have a version history and you can say the permissions are set up in a way that you can only change your own cells. So don't worry about breaking things, just play around with the map. This is huge. This I cannot sort of overemphasize this, how important this is in day-to-day use. Like visualizing the map, that's one. That's great. But actually getting people to use and engage with the map, that's a completely different story. And safety guards like this make your life so much easier. The last thing I want to comment on with regards to the sharing and collaboration and accountability is the comment feature. So for every cell, you have the comment feature and that's either this icon or right-click command. And there is a shortcut here. So let's say we want to ask a team member to do something about the cell. Hey, we need more research here. Can you look at this? And then we can even tag them and say, hey, Mark, can you look at this and assign it to me? And I will get an email to actually log in and check out what's going on over here. I can do this on a cell level. I can add comments on an entire row level. Let's see where is the comment feature? Command here. This is great. And well, in this case, it did it on one cell. I could select. I want to select. Nah, come on. Play with me. I want to select this row and then comment. Perfect. OK. Let's see where it added. It added it here. I was hoping that I would be able to comment on these two cells. Well, apparently you can only comment on a cell, not a range of cells. Let's double check that if that's true. Yeah, you can only comment on a cell level. But then again, that works here. I can mark this as resolved when the comment is done and keep this around. This is again, because you are able to add comments, to add explanations, to tag people. This is great. A practical example would be like, if you have a negative customer emotion over here, you could add a comment and say, we found that people hate X. So you can add some context to this negative emotion. Really useful. What else is there to say about this journey map and using journey maps on a day-to-day level? Well, a very common scenario is that you want to export and print your journey map. You might have a workshop next day with a specific team which you don't want to show the entire map, or you have to show the map to your boss and you don't want to show the entire expanded map, but just a small section. So how would we do that in Google Sheets? Well, we go to File, Download and then PDF and then you see that we have the map over here. And as you see, the cells that are collapsed in our subgroups aren't displayed. So we could set it like this and we can even expand it. We can show highlights and notes. Let's see, cancel. And let's say I want to expand. I want to include this as well. Or I want to, I don't know when you would like to do it, but let's say I just want to print the customer emotion lane. I would go to Download, PDF and then I say A4, current sheet, selected cells. And there we go. We just have the customer emotion. You have a lot of flexibility around exporting this, changing sizes, making sure that it's spread out across multiple pages. I think professional tools like Custolans and Smapply have implemented this quite well. I think Google Sheets holds up just as well as the other tools are in regards to this. All right, we've covered so much ground already, but we're not quite done yet. If you're still here, leave a comment down below, hashtag commitment, because that's awesome that you're still here. The most important thing we need to look at is how does Google Sheets in Excel stack up against those other journey mapping tools that you can choose? So let's dive into that. Now, even though I'm quite excited about Google Sheets as a customer journey mapping tool, there are definitely some disadvantages. And let's look at those first. The obvious one is that you don't get a customer journey map structure when you start using the tool. You get a spreadsheet. And in order to create your journey map, you have to know which structure you want. Which lengths do you need? How many? How are you going to structure the information? When you're new, this can be quite overwhelming, but I guess this is the price you pay for having the flexibility of completely creating the structure that you want. But this can take a lot of time. This can ask some experience with journey mapping from you. Of course, there are templates out there that you can sort of copy and try to recreate in Google Sheets. But again, not having a journey map structure can be a disadvantage. Another challenge with using Google Sheets is that it's quite easy to create a very left brain and rational journey map. It is a spreadsheet. And if you're not careful, it will stay as spreadsheet. So adding that visual layer, adding that story layer to the map is really important. And with Google Sheets, you need to do a little bit more effort compared to the other tools. You need to mess around a little bit more with color schemes, making it visually interesting. It is possible, but again, it requires conscious decisions and your attention to make sure that it doesn't stay and become an Excel sheet, a spreadsheet. And it does really become a customer journey map. Some of the other journey mapping tools out there also allow you to create stakeholder maps, empathy maps, personas. Google Sheets is a spreadsheet tool. It will never give you specifically those options just as it doesn't give you the option to create a journey map. You have to make it from scratch. So don't expect an empathy map template in Google Sheets. What I would do is use Google Sheets to create the journey map and use a tool like Miro or Miro to create my empathy map and then just link to that specific Miro or Miro board using a link in Google Sheets. I think that would work fine. An issue that you might run into is that your company doesn't have a license to use Google Sheets, but also this is the same challenge when using Miro, Smapply, Customers. You all have to have a license for that. With some Google products or even some Microsoft products, you might run into compliance policies within your company. But the final disadvantage of using Google Sheets or Excel as a customer experience professional is I think one of credibility. If you're using Google Sheets, you're using a generic tool to accomplish a job that's possible, but a professional has their own tools. Like if you hire a professional mechanic, you expect that they have a different set of tools than you have in your garden shed. And the same goes for you as a customer experience professional. Sometimes it's just better for your credibility within your organization to have your own professional set of tools rather than trying to customize the other generic tools that are out there. Don't underestimate how important this can be. I've already mentioned a lot of advantages of using Google Sheets and I have to say I'm quite surprised by how powerful this tool is for using and creating customer journey maps. But one thing I haven't yet addressed and I want to do that right now is that customer Google Sheets and Excel are accessible tools to other people in the organization. And as you know, collaboration, sharing, having people engage with the journey map, it's like the ultimate success factor. And when you use a tool which is scary, which has a high learning curve, people won't use it. If you give your boss or manager or other team Google Sheets or Excel, they will be more likely that they are comfortable with using the tool. They will recognize it and then your chance that they will engage with your journey map is greater, is higher and that's actually super, super important. So the Google Sheets and Excel are less scary than professional journey mapping tools and that's a real big advantage. So if I could choose between generic tools like mirror or mural and between professional journey mapping tools like Smapply and Custolence, when would I use Google Sheets? I think it's really, for me, it boils down to three really simple things and this is assuming that I don't have an existing customer journey map tool in place. If I would do just do a workshop, customer journey mapping workshop with a team and I'm just interested in capturing the results of that workshop, I would probably use a tool like Miro to quickly visualize and capture and collaborate and then we probably aren't using that map after that workshop. That's when I would use a tool like Miro. If, on the other hand, I would have a project, let's say for three months around redesigning the experience of buying tickets at the zoo, I would use a tool like Google Sheets because people can easily cooperate around this, we can easily share this, it's accessible, it probably doesn't require new licenses, so we can get started really quickly. I think in a project situation, a project-oriented journey map, Google Sheets is a really, really good option. Now, the final option, the dedicated and professional journey mapping tools like Customers' Mapply, when your plan is to use journey maps as sort of the central customer experience dashboard that you'll be using over and over again to come up with new initiatives, to make business decisions, to drive change using a dedicated and professional journey mapping tool is still the way to go. It makes life easier, it has small tweaks that just make your workflow a bit more efficient and in the end, if your plan to use it for a longer period, that's definitely worth it and your journey maps will become sort of business capital. You're going to invest in journey maps and you want to have tools that really support that, so that's when I would use professional journey mapping tools. If you want to get your hands on the journey map that we've just created, check out the link that's in the video description down below and then just make a copy of this map and start playing around with it, start messing around with it and see how far you come. If you've been creating journey maps in Excel, Google Sheets and have some tips, tricks, pieces of advice for the people who are watching, leave a comment down below. I would love to know how you are using these tools. Also, if you've made it all the way to here in that video, you might be wondering, well, what's the right structure for my journey map? Which lanes do I need? How many do I need? How detailed should it be? Well, in this next video, I show you three very different journey map templates that can help you to understand which one is right for you and get you off the right start. So check out this next video and learn about the right journey mapping templates for your next project. See you.