Styles

Quick reference

• 00:00 Now in this video, we're going to look at styles in Excel.
• 00:08 And this is kind of a piece that a lot of people don't use.
• 00:12 But what you'll find is that if you're developing spreadsheets and you actually
• 00:14 take the time to apply styles, it doesn't necessarily help you design a better
• 00:19 workbook any faster, but what it does do is if somebody comes back and
• 00:23 wants you to make changes, it can really help you do that quite quickly.
• 00:26 So I'll show you first off, we've got some built-in styles in the gallery.
• 00:30 Let's say that we wanted to
• 00:32 change the header of this to look a little bit more bold and whatnot.
• 00:37 Over here on the home tab, we have the cell styles box.
• 00:40 And you'll notice on here that there's a few different titles and headings that
• 00:43 are prebuilt, as well as some accents and some data and model stuff as well.
• 00:47 I'm going go click on title,
• 00:49 and you'll notice that this changes into a new title style.
• 00:52 So that's kinda neat, because I can use the same kind of theme everywhere to
• 00:55 make sure it's consistent through the document if I've got multiple pages.
• 01:00 What I would like to do, though, is I'd like to set up a custom style.
• 01:03 This is where things get kind of interesting.
• 01:06 So I'm gonna grab this block right here of cells, and what I'm gonna do is I'm
• 01:10 gonna say, okay, let's format this the way that I'd like to see it.
• 01:15 So maybe I'll go and put a comma style on this, and
• 01:18 I'll just drop the decimals back.
• 01:21 I'm gonna go to Cell Styles and I'm gonna say New Cell Style.
• 01:25 And what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna call the cell style DE_Values.
• 01:30 So this is for data entry for values.
• 01:33 And you can see that I have the option to choose different pieces that I would like
• 01:36 included in the style package.
• 01:39 It says, would you like to include the border?
• 01:40 And it's already unchecked it because it recognizes that my bottom cell
• 01:44 has a border and the rest don't.
• 01:45 So I say well, that's cool.
• 01:46 I don't wanna deal with that then.
• 01:48 The font, I'm not really worried about it, so I'm gonna uncheck it.
• 01:51 The alignment, I'm not really worried about that, either.
• 01:53 Although I might wanna put that in.
• 01:55 The number format, absolutely.
• 01:57 I wanna make sure it has this number format.
• 01:59 The fill is shaded, sure.
• 02:01 Protection locked, no problem.
• 02:03 If I want to modify any of these things, I just click on Format and
• 02:06 I can actually go in there and take a look at the different pieces, and
• 02:09 work here all the tabs to get everything set up exactly the way I want.
• 02:13 For right now, we'll say OK.
• 02:14 I'll say OK.
• 02:17 Now the trick with this though is that once you've done this,
• 02:20 you actually have to go back and you actually have to tell Excel that
• 02:23 I really want to apply my custom style to these cells.
• 02:27 Right now you can notice down at the bottom, it's still set with the number
• 02:30 format of comma, it hasn't picked up my custom style.
• 02:33 So I'm gonna click DE_Values on this.
• 02:37 Why is this important?
• 02:38 Well there's a couple reasons.
• 02:39 Let's go and select this one, and say DE_Values.
• 02:43 And you'll notice that it changes the number format as well.
• 02:45 I'm gonna scroll down my worksheet a little bit here and
• 02:48 I'm gonna grab some more of these too.
• 02:50 And you'd be forgiven for
• 02:52 asking at this point in time why would you bother doing this?
• 02:55 This just seems like really kind of copying a bunch of different formatting so
• 02:58 why change this at all?
• 03:00 What's the point if really all we need to
• 03:02 use is the Format Painter to make this happen?
• 03:05 And as I said before,
• 03:07 if you're just trying to design your spreadsheet the first time,
• 03:10 it probably isn't gonna be something that you're really thinking about.
• 03:13 But what you wanna think about is what's gonna happen in the future.
• 03:16 If I'm building another worksheet later,
• 03:18 I don't have to remember what the style packages that I've used,
• 03:20 cuz this is gonna inherit everything that I've actually claimed, or
• 03:23 everything that I've assigned to it, from font colors to font sizes,
• 03:27 to borders and all that kind of jazz if I actually configured those.
• 03:30 But where things get really useful is where you run into a situation like this.
• 03:36 And I say you know, my boss comes in he says,
• 03:38 hey listen, I would like you to modify the input cells here,
• 03:43 because I don't really like a dark or a light blue for the color.
• 03:46 In my world, and
• 03:48 I'll tell you in my world, all my data input cells are always green.
• 03:51 Green means go, and I tell people, if it's not green, don't put any data in there,
• 03:55 because it's probably formula.
• 03:56 But if it's green, it's your license to do with what you like.
• 03:58 So I'm gonna say, well this is kinda interesting,
• 04:00 let's change the fill on this now.
• 04:02 So we'll go to format, we'll go to fill, and
• 04:05 I'm gonna change this background color to a light green here.
• 04:09 And I'm going to say OK.
• 04:11 I'm gonna say OK.
• 04:14 And you can see immediately that all of the data entry cells
• 04:18 that are using that cell style have updated.
• 04:22 This is the benefit of styles.
• 04:24 When your marketing department comes in and says, hey we changed the colors on our
• 04:27 entire organization and we need you to use your proper color schemes.
• 04:31 One click, well, couple of clicks, but one package you have to change and boom,
• 04:34 it updates throughout your entire worksheet.
• 04:36 You know everything's consistent.
• 04:38 That's where the benefit of styles really, really comes in.
• 04:42 As compared to, if you'd actually set all your formats independently, you'd now be
• 04:46 doing a whole lot of copying and pasting with the format painter trying to get
• 04:49 those colors rolled through the entire document, wherever they could be found.

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