I'm really glad you reached out to me! The final chart is impressively clean and easy on the eyes, especially compared to the original. I'm also quite proud of you for being able to take my design tips, which were pretty high level rather than "make this cell this color and this cell that", and action them. Keep up the great work and thank you so much for sharing the final!

For those who would like to also go to the insom school of design, here's the exact message I sent Cumol:

Alright so there are three things that will dramatically improve this: whitespace, color, and typography.

Type is easiest. Go on google fonts and grab like Lato or Source Sans Pro or Open Sans or Fira Sans or Roboto or something. It just makes it not look like your typical sheet. Now make the line height of the rows almost twice as big as the font. Give it some room to breathe.

Color is not as easy but luckily there are a ton of people who have done the hard work for you.

http://www.colourlovers.com/ & http://flatuicolors.com/ & http://www.flatuicolorpicker.com/

http://www.colourlovers.com/palette/462628/Blazin_Jell-O_Rainbo

http://www.colourlovers.com/palette/101556/Flat

http://www.colourlovers.com/palette/434904/espresso_rainbow

http://www.colourlovers.com/palette/3635917/Rainbow_Ghost

http://paletton.com/ & https://color.adobe.com/ can be helpful for making pallets too.

Don't use black, use like dark gray: http://www.color-hex.com/color/333333

This is also a really awesome blog on how one company expanded their color pallet. I wouldn't expect you to do this, but its good to get the idea of how colors work together. Plus, their final pallet is really gorgeous and may work for you. http://viget.com/inspire/add-colors-to-your-palette-with-color-mixing

This is an exceptional post on designing presentations - for inspiration, etc. http://visage.co/downloads/Business_Guide_to_Visual_Communication_by_Visage.pdf

Here's a demo for a table I have saved. This will give you an idea of how much space your rows / columns should have in order to look prettier and have that white space I mentioned earlier. This table uses the font Lato. http://tympanus.net/Tutorials/StickyTableHeaders/

I don't know how easy it is to choose Hex colors in excel but maybe just try to get close. There may be a plugin available or something that lets you enter the Hex code.

Let me know if you need any other help or want me to take another look. I kinda just did a brain/link dump but I hope it is helpful!

Seriously - you have a remarkable ability to pick things up and make things happen with little direction (and messy direction) – that is a seriously great skill. Be proud of yourself, keep it up. I have no doubt you are going places.