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About this lesson
Learn how to apply built-in number styles and create your own custom styles packages.
Exercise files
Download this lesson’s related exercise files.
Styles28.9 KB Styles - Completed
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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 across 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, go to the Home tab > Cell Styles > Heading 2
- These styles will be the same throughout 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, I want to show you how a little bit of pre-planning and foresight
- 00:09 can actually help make updates to the styles of your workbook very, very easy.
- 00:14 So typically, what we do, and we're building something,
- 00:16 is we'll grab a set of rows for our header here.
- 00:19 And we'll increase the font size, and change the bold, set the color,
- 00:22 and all those kind of things.
- 00:23 And we do it all manually.
- 00:24 So when you get to another worksheet, you've gotta do the same thing again.
- 00:27 And after you've got 50 worksheets,
- 00:29 there's bound to be a couple that have an inconsistent style heading.
- 00:32 Put that in front of an accountant and
- 00:34 they lose their mind because they value consistency.
- 00:36 And this is what the Styles Gallery is all about,
- 00:39 is promoting consistency through your workbook.
- 00:42 So in this case, if I have a report title, for example, I could go and
- 00:45 choose the Title style.
- 00:47 And if I apply that consistently on every single workbook,
- 00:50 everything will be the same on every single worksheet,
- 00:53 because it's a predefined package that gets applied to the cells.
- 00:57 And if it's ever modified or
- 00:59 updated, it rolls through every single cell that has that style.
- 01:03 We also know that we can do number formatting using things like comma styles,
- 01:07 for example, to go and actually assign this block.
- 01:09 But this actually starts to show the problem that we have when our stuff has
- 01:14 been applied willy-nilly and ad hoc.
- 01:16 Notice that these data entry cells have this format, these ones do not.
- 01:21 But how do I roll it through to make it consistent without having to go and
- 01:24 apply it to each block of cells?
- 01:26 So let me just undo this and show you how I like to take care of this.
- 01:30 Now, Microsoft has provided some built-in styles for data.
- 01:33 So we've got an input cell here that would make it look like this nice lovely orange
- 01:38 here, not my favorite.
- 01:39 So what I'm going to do is I'm going to build my own input cell,
- 01:42 because in actual fact, when I'm building things,
- 01:45 I usually create multiple styles for what we actually have here.
- 01:49 I'm going to create one called DE, for data entry, underscore values.
- 01:53 And I'll typically create one for values, dates, and text.
- 01:58 And if I've got different numeric styles, I might have values underscore decimal
- 02:02 zero underscore decimal two or something like that.
- 02:05 Notice that it's picked up, that there's consistency amongst the cells but
- 02:09 not the border.
- 02:10 This one here has a bottom border.
- 02:11 So it says, well, I don't know what you want to do with that.
- 02:13 If you'd like to force a border on everything, we can do that,
- 02:16 but I'm going to leave it alone.
- 02:17 It says, your font is this, your alignment is general.
- 02:20 Okay, no problem, your number format is general.
- 02:24 Yeah, that's great, but you know what?
- 02:25 I don't really want that to be a general number format.
- 02:28 So I'm going to go to click on Format > Number,
- 02:31 I'm going to choose Accounting with no symbol and 0 decimal places.
- 02:36 Will say, OK, and what I'm going to do at this point in time is I'm going to say,
- 02:40 all right, let's accept this.
- 02:41 So, this cell style that I'm building is going to have my comma style with
- 02:46 zero decimals.
- 02:47 It's going to be a line general on the bottom.
- 02:50 It's going to use this specific font, it will not influence borders at all.
- 02:54 So if there's a border on the cell, it will leave it there.
- 02:56 If there's not a border, it will not add one.
- 02:59 It will put in the fill color that I have selected, blue, and
- 03:02 it will lock the cell from a protection standpoint.
- 03:05 If I go and say, OK, at this point, you'll notice nothing happens.
- 03:09 Why?
- 03:10 Well, because we just created the style, we now need to apply it.
- 03:14 And when we do, it looks like this, okay?
- 03:18 Well, but you still have to go through and apply it to every block.
- 03:21 So have I really saved myself any effort?
- 03:25 And the answer on this one is not during the setup, as a matter of fact,
- 03:28 that cost you time.
- 03:29 But check this out.
- 03:32 I now want to deploy this as an input template to somebody.
- 03:37 I'm going to go right-click on the style, and
- 03:39 I'm going to modify it because I realize that there's something I need to do.
- 03:42 I need to make sure that the protection is changed, and
- 03:45 I actually want the color to be different.
- 03:47 So I'm going to go to Format, and Fill, and change the color to light green.
- 03:52 In my workbooks, green means go.
- 03:54 If it's green, you can put data in.
- 03:56 I'm also going to go to the Protection tab, and
- 03:58 I'm going to unlock these particular cells.
- 04:00 I'm going to say, OK, and OK.
- 04:03 You'll notice that all of them change to green immediately.
- 04:06 And if I go and right click, and go to Format Cells on this one, and
- 04:09 go to the Protection tab, you'll notice that it is now unlocked as well.
- 04:13 And this is where that pre-setup and thinking about things in advance makes it
- 04:17 very easy to deploy consistent changes throughout your entire workbook very,
- 04:22 very quickly.
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