Best Character Sheet?

I haven't really looked around to try to figure it out but is the official character sheet the best OR is there another one that people tend to prefer more?

By "official"? Which one do you mean?

There's the character sheet as shown in the PHB. There's the character sheet that comes out of the offline Character Builder. Then there's the character sheet that comes out of the online Character Builder. All three of these were created by WotC, so they are all "official".

I've grown accustomed to both of the Character Builder sheets. I think the online one is a little "prettier" to look at, but it also ends up making more sheets all total. Most of my players use a "summary style" sheet that they've adapted from a sheet that I adapted from someone online (on these forums, I believe). It puts almost every single thing on a single sheet of paper. They still keep their CB prints with them, but those are only used for reference when the summary sheet doesn't have the specific detail they might need.

I think that the "best one" is the one that has the information the player needs in a place they can find quickly and keeps them from digging in to the books.

Sounds great! Yeah, I meant the PHB one by "official" but I could have been clearer.

One of the things that I've found about 4E is that there is a LOT of explanatory text. On the one hand, I think that is great. Having a very clear description of a power printed in front of the the player is quite handy. On the other hand, the "power card" format that was used tends to end up requiring a lot of pages.

Most players, after a few sessions, will understand terms like "until the end of your next turn" and "save ends". And so these terms can be abbreviated (to things like ENT and SE). And, once you get a few of these terms abbreviated, many powers can be expressed in a single line of text on a character sheet.

I don't really have one of my summary sheets in a place where I could link it to this thread. But I'm pretty sure that it was someone on this site that had the sheet that I used to make mine. I'll dig through the threads and see if I can find it and link that thread here.

If I'm using a character builder I'm generally going to use the character sheet that prints out of it (whether on paper or to PDF for electronic use).
If not there was a format that, I'm 99% sure, came from someone on this board that basically makes displays the character and power in a psuedo-monster block format. It was in a Word doc and basically puts the character on a single page (if you use abbreviations like ENT).
I did up some level 2 characters in that format for a one shot and it worked out fine with half the players being 1st timers.
TjD