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About this lesson
Learn how to apply built-in number styles and create your own custom styles packages.
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Exercise files
Download the ‘before’ and ‘after’ Excel workbooks from the video tutorial and try the lesson yourself.
Styles.xlsx28.2 KB Styles - Completed.xlsx
25.9 KB
Quick reference
Styles
Applying built-in number styles and creating our own custom styles packages.
When to use
Styles have many benefits, but probably the biggest is the ability to easily update the look and feel over our spreadsheets with minimal effort.
Instructions
Applying built-in styles
- Select D4:D20, go to the Home tab
- Apply the Currency style by clicking the $ sign on the Number group
- Select A3:D3, got to the Home tab > Cell Styles > Heading 2
- These styles will be the same through the entire workbook
Creating custom styles
- Go to the Home tab > Cell Styles and click New Cell Style
- Enter “DE_Values” for the Style Name
- Uncheck Alignment, Font and Border, as we don’t want to control those (but we do the rest)
- Click Format
- Set the Number to Accounting with no symbols
- Set the Fill tab to a light green background
- On the Protection tab, uncheck the “Locked” checkbox and click OK
- Select D4:D20, go to the Home tab > Cell Styles > DE_Values
- Notice that your cells turn green. You can now educate your users to only enter data in the green cells
Updating built-in styles
- Assume head office asks you to turn the green to orange
- Go to the Home tab > Cell Styles > right click DE_Values and choose Modify
- Click Format, change the fill and click OK to return to the worksheet
- Every single cell in the workbook that has this style applied will update immediately to reflect the changes
- 00:04 In this video, we're gonna talk about Styles, which are essentially
- 00:08 a prepackaged formatting collection that you can apply in different areas.
- 00:13 Now why this is important?
- 00:15 Is it actually allows you, if you set up your Styles in advance,
- 00:17 to very quickly update your workbook when somebody wants some changes things makes
- 00:21 life a lot easier.
- 00:22 So this is good groundwork that you can lay out
- 00:25 to make sure that your redevelopment is going to be simpler.
- 00:29 Now there are built in styles.
- 00:30 If I were to go in and say, let's go and grab the headers, I could
- 00:33 go to Cell Styles, and choose one of the title and headings styles at the top here.
- 00:37 So I could change this into, say, a Title at the top of my report.
- 00:41 And I know that everywhere in the workbook you use this title style
- 00:45 it will look exactly the same.
- 00:48 Where styles become more powerful though,
- 00:50 is where we actually start to create our own.
- 00:53 These areas here are data input cells.
- 00:55 I like to tell my users green means go.
- 00:57 So I always color my data entry cells in green.
- 01:01 I like to create a specific style for these.
- 01:04 So I'm gonna go to Cell Styles, and I'm gonna choose New Cell Style.
- 01:09 The first thing it asks me for is a name.
- 01:11 Right now, this one is called Style 1.
- 01:13 I'm gonna give it a name of DE_Values, so this is my data entries for values.
- 01:21 We have the option to change a few different things on the way here,
- 01:24 it says the number format.
- 01:26 I'm gonna leave a check box there, because I definitely want to control this.
- 01:29 I'm not happy with General, I'm gonna change it, but
- 01:32 I want to make sure that happens.
- 01:33 Alignment, sure, we'll leave that.
- 01:36 The Font, I'm not really worried about the size of the font in this particular case.
- 01:40 No matter what the size of the font is, I want to apply the rest of the rule.
- 01:43 Borders, don't care about that.
- 01:44 The Fill, definitely want that one, and the Protection status as well.
- 01:49 Let's go to Format, and see if we can control these.
- 01:52 We'll start with our Number format.
- 01:55 I'm gonna go and set this to an Accounting format with no symbols on the front and
- 02:01 with no decimals.
- 02:02 And the sample that I get is 25,000, that looks pretty good.
- 02:06 The Alignment, I'm not super worried about.
- 02:09 The Font, I'm not super worried about as well.
- 02:12 The Fill however, I wanna change this to be in a nice light green.
- 02:18 And the Protection status, I'm gonna set to unlocked.
- 02:22 And now when I say, OK, and I say, OK,
- 02:25 it actually creates the new style, but nothing really has changed.
- 02:29 And that's the trick here, is you need to come up,
- 02:32 find your new style under Custom, and click Apply.
- 02:36 And at that point, it will change for you.
- 02:38 And now I can say, hey, let's go in and
- 02:40 apply the same style to all of my data input cells.
- 02:46 Now you think, what's the big deal?
- 02:48 You could very easily go and you could change all these things to green, and
- 02:51 it would be super, super simple.
- 02:52 So why go to all the work of setting up a style?
- 02:56 And that's a valid point, but the thing is,
- 02:58 is that it's actually not about the initial setup, it's about the reuse.
- 03:02 Because then your boss comes along and says, I don't like that green.
- 03:06 I wanna see this in light blue.
- 03:09 Previously, you'd have to go and select every style in the workbook.
- 03:12 But for us now, right click will modify it.
- 03:16 We'll come back to our format, and we'll go back to the Fill tab,
- 03:19 and we'll say, which blue do you want?
- 03:21 I want this one right here.
- 03:22 Great, OK, and OK, and everything is done.
- 03:28 So styles are a great tool to allow you to lay the groundwork for
- 03:33 quick updates on things.
- 03:35 I like to use different styles for data entry values, for system, so
- 03:39 I can actually all make sure that things are indented property, and
- 03:42 have consistent headings and formats all the way through my document.
- 03:45 And that way if anybody ever comes back and ask me to change something,
- 03:48 it's a very quick update and boom, it goes all the way through the whole thing.
- 03:51 If I need to highlight cells that are user entry based boom, I can change it real
- 03:55 quick and have them all showing yellow for a little bit, and then switch them back.
- 03:58 So it's a very useful tool for
- 03:59 redevelopment in a hurry when you generally have little time.
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