Formatting

Quick reference

• 00:04 In this video, we're gonna look at some Excel formatting basics,
• 00:08 stuff that we can do to make our day to look a little bit more interesting or
• 00:12 enticing rather than just having the plain Jane formatting that we see right here.
• 00:17 So if we want to start messing around with things, the easiest way to
• 00:20 control the visual appearance on anything is to go to the Home tab.
• 00:24 Now I've selected cell A5 with our Sports Store inventory,
• 00:27 and what I'd like to do I'd like to start by changing the font.
• 00:31 So up in the top here,
• 00:33 where it says Calibri, I'm gonna hit my little drop down arrow.
• 00:35 And we're gonna take a look at some different font options.
• 00:39 And you'll notice that as I start scrolling here,
• 00:41 you can actually see in the cells that it's actually making changes even though I
• 00:45 haven't clicked anything.
• 00:47 This is called live preview,
• 00:48 what I am going to do is I am going to choose Ariel Black.
• 00:52 And that's a different font very much than what we had before, but
• 00:55 it's not quite big enough yet.
• 00:57 So I'm gonna make it a little bit bigger by increasing the font
• 00:59 size by just clicking this button and maybe we'll set it to about a 14 point.
• 01:03 Now let's play with ball inventory.
• 01:06 What can we do here?
• 01:06 We can dial this one up a little bit as well and maybe we could make it italics.
• 01:12 Maybe we could change the font color to something like nice dark green.
• 01:18 And then again, we can go and we can pick something else.
• 01:20 What looks, Algerian, that looks like kind of a fun font, so we'll grab that one.
• 01:25 And maybe even click on underline.
• 01:27 So we can obviously play around and do different things depending on what we want
• 01:32 to make it look and feel that our document should be.
• 01:36 Now, what else can we do here?
• 01:39 So far, we've only formatted an individual cell.
• 01:41 What if we wanted to format multiple cells?
• 01:44 Well, we'll grab all of these guys by left-clicking and dragging.
• 01:48 And what I'm going to do is I'm going to change the background fill color.
• 01:52 I'm going to change it to this nice deep purple.
• 01:56 The only problem with this is when I click away,
• 01:58 it's really hard to read those words.
• 01:59 So I think I'm gonna change the font color on these guys as well.
• 02:03 We'll go almost say let's change this to be a white font, and
• 02:07 just to make it pop a little bit more we'll go and we'll set it to bold.
• 02:12 And as a matter of fact, I'm not really happy with the way that these two columns
• 02:16 are actually sitting here.
• 02:17 So I'm gonna come up to the Alignment tab.
• 02:19 And if I just mouse over this guy here, it tells me that this will center my content.
• 02:24 So I'm gonna click on that, and it will center those columns quite nicely for me.
• 02:27 So that starts to look pretty good.
• 02:30 Now what I might wanna do next is maybe I wanna put a border around my table.
• 02:35 So I'm gonna go and I'm gonna select all these cells here.
• 02:39 And right up on the Home tab, you'll notice that there's an area here for
• 02:42 borders.
• 02:43 Now it's showing right now just the bottom border, but
• 02:45 we actually have the option to go and play around with lots of different borders.
• 02:49 So we could take something like this, the thick, outside border.
• 02:53 And if we click on that, you'll notice not really a lot changes here, but
• 02:57 when I click away, it's got a nice black border on top, right And on the bottom.
• 03:03 Now you can't see the one on the left, but it is definitely there.
• 03:06 And if you were to print it, you would see that that's absolutely the case.
• 03:10 Now the next thing that I might wanna do is maybe I wanna change the color in
• 03:13 this area too.
• 03:15 I'll set it to something else,
• 03:16 I don't know, how about a light orange or something like that?
• 03:18 And again, even though I haven't actually clicked anything you'll notice that
• 03:22 the live preview is kicking into show me exactly what's going on.
• 03:25 So if I decide that that orange isn't quite right and maybe I'd rather see it in
• 03:29 a nice light yellow or a dark gold, I can actually mouse over and
• 03:32 see what it's gonna look like before I commit to it.
• 03:35 And this is pretty cool.
• 03:37 So I'm gonna click on gold here.
• 03:39 And now what I would like to do is I would like to actually have a border around each
• 03:42 one of these cells.
• 03:44 Would I normally do this?
• 03:45 No, but just for
• 03:46 the sake of formatting here, I wanna show you some different ways to make this work.
• 03:50 Now we have a few different options.
• 03:53 I really wanna go into more granular border control.
• 03:56 I could do that by clicking on this dialog box launcher,
• 03:59 which will launch me into the format cells dialog.
• 04:02 There is another way to get here as well though.
• 04:04 So I'm just gonna cancel this.
• 04:05 What I'm gonna do is, I'm just gonna right click on any one of these cells and
• 04:09 choose format cells.
• 04:11 And this will take me into the format cells dialog,
• 04:14 which actually has a lot of different options.
• 04:16 On one of them, here's the Border tab.
• 04:18 And this gives us the ability to gradually set
• 04:21 the borders the way that we want them.
• 04:23 Now you'll notice that we're selected right now on this big, dark bar, and
• 04:27 it doesn't have a border on the left-hand side.
• 04:29 But I could certainly put one in if I wanted to just by clicking here.
• 04:33 I could also choose to apply inside borders by clicking here.
• 04:38 And that will actually put a border across the middle.
• 04:40 Why not up and down the center?
• 04:42 Well, because there's only one column in this area.
• 04:45 Notice that this is not giving me a live preview.
• 04:48 But when I go and click OK, you'll see that it actually puts
• 04:51 the borders around each one of those individual cells.
• 04:55 I can do all kinds of stuff from that dialog.
• 04:57 If I can't to go, right-click, and say Format Cells again,
• 05:00 you'll notice that we have the ability to control fonts, regular, bold, italic.
• 05:05 We can choose the different font styles here and
• 05:07 the underlines, all kinds of different things on our Alignment tab.
• 05:11 There's lots of different options for horizontal alignments in here.
• 05:16 And on the number tab, we have the ability to go and choose different things.
• 05:19 So if I wanted say currency, and maybe I work in a multicultural organization that
• 05:24 doesn't actually look after dollar signs here, I could even change this to go and
• 05:29 get the Armenian currency or the Sakha or a Russian currency as well,
• 05:33 if I want to see that on these cells.
• 05:35 So even though I might not be able to pick that up from the currency buttons up here,
• 05:39 which gives us some common currencies,
• 05:41 I have much more granular control to really show things away that I want.
• 05:45 So that's basic formatting in Excel.

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