Formatting

Quick reference

• 00:03 We've got some data, now the next thing that most users want to do is they want to format it.
• 00:08 So how do we go about making our worksheet look better with Excel?
• 00:13 It all comes down to formatting of course and the different things that we can do.
• 00:17 So we can actually format single cells, individual cells just
• 00:21 by clicking on the cell itself. And even though the data hangs off the side what would happen
• 00:26 if we went and said let's change the font. So on the Home tab we've got Calibri here lets go change it to Arial Black.
• 00:34 You'll notice that even though the information hangs off the side of the cell, it's all maintained in cell A1 it still changes the font
• 00:42 for the entire cells.So that's kind of nice. We can change the font size up if we want to maybe a 12 point, that'll make it a little bit bigger.
• 00:49 With our ball inventory lets change that to a different font. We'll go and we'll pick Algerian. That looks interesting.
• 00:55 And maybe we can go and change that one up to a 14pt and we'll make it italics and we'll underline it.
• 01:02 Do a bunch of different things. Maybe we'll even change the font color by clicking on this box
• 01:07 and going with a green font or something silly.
• 01:11 So there we go we've now been able to start fooling around with these different pieces
• 01:15 we have some headers for tables here. Maybe we want to go through and we want to set this with
• 01:20 a different color background fill. So we'll go with at nice purple background.
• 01:25 And we'll change it to a white font.
• 01:28 We can make it bold. So you see the difference between what I did this time and last time is that
• 01:32 I actually selected three cells and applied the exact same formatting to them at the
• 01:37 same time. Whereas in this case here we went with one cell at a time. So we can do
• 01:43 single cells or we can do entire ranges of cells as well which is kind of nice.
• 01:50 What if we wanted to create a border around our table here?
• 01:54 Well the first thing I want to do is I just want to show you really quickly in Print Preview that when
• 01:58 I look at this right now it doesn't really look like there's a border around this table
• 02:02 at all. So if I go back and I say lets go select this area here,
• 02:08 I have a drop down box that allows me to get to Borders, lets put a thick border around this.
• 02:14 Now I can see it on the top that black line I can see it on the right and on the bottom.
• 02:20 But I can't see it on the left. Yet when I go into my print preview
• 02:25 you can see that it is definitely there and that's because
• 02:28 the formatting that butts up against the left side of whatever is on the screen here isn't going to necessarily show. So sometimes you can end
• 02:35 up with a little bit of weird formatting in those kind of areas because of that.
• 02:41 What about numbers? Maybe we want to have these numbers formatted with currency signs, dollar signs. We have a couple
• 02:48 of options. We could pick off the list right here for what is our currency of choice that
• 02:52 we would like to use. So if we're in the UK we could make it pounds
• 02:56 and that would add it right away or if we're in North America we could make it dollar signs, that would work.
• 03:02 The other thing we can do is we can pick from a variety of different formats up the top here as well
• 03:08 a little bit more to choose from in Currency or Accounting.
• 03:12 There we go, that didn't really change anything from the looks there or we can get
• 03:15 really really fun with this stuff and we can actually go and click the dialog box
• 03:20 launcher in the corner here and at that point it will launch us into this window.
• 03:26 And in this window we can actually go through and start looking at all kinds of different things because now we can start customizing our
• 03:31 formats. Maybe I don't want 2 decimal places I need 3.
• 03:35 And I don't actually really want the currency symbol on this thing, hey you know what maybe I want to go and use
• 03:41 something that wasn't in that default list of... this one right here
• 03:46 and say OK. It'll actually go and start converting all those things
• 03:49 for me. So this is how we get into a little bit more advanced
• 03:52 number formatting. As we click that dialog box launcher and we can look through all the different formats that are available to us
• 03:59 and often customize them if there's a little windows in there to actually go and make any changes. So this is kind of neat because we've
• 04:06 got a whole pile of flexibility, particularly with numbers that we can actually format.
• 04:11 We actually in the same dialog box though, also have the ability to change our alignment,
• 04:17 our fonts, so if we wanted to make this bold we could do that here.
• 04:21 We can change our borders maybe I'd like to have a border on the outside and inside of every one of these cells
• 04:30 and I'd like to add a really nice light color fill of a nice light orange.
• 04:35 So I've selected all of these things. We don't see any of it in this table now but as soon as I click OK
• 04:40 we can see that it applies everything. Oh, I must have chosen a date format, that's not so good.
• 04:44 Let's go back, we'll take a look, we'll go back to accounting
• 04:48 and we'll go back and put it into this one here with no decimal places, or sorry 2 decimal places but no symbol and it fixes that all up.
• 04:55 So now you've seen how you can pick off individual pieces of formatting as well as how you can go back and actually
• 05:01 work through the entire dialog to look at a little bit more complex formatting
• 05:06 on either single cells or ranges.

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