Cell Formatting

Quick reference

• 00:04 In this video, we're gonna look at how to format cells.
• 00:07 And this is one the tasks that most people love to do with Excel,
• 00:11 is make their data look pretty.
• 00:13 So, we'll take a look at some different options that we have here.
• 00:16 The first one that I'd to look at is how to actually center properly
• 00:21 across a selected range.
• 00:22 So if we look at cells B3 through B5 here,
• 00:27 these are obviously titles that belong centered across the top of this table.
• 00:32 Now, one of the big things that a lot of people will do is they'll
• 00:34 merge cells and center.
• 00:36 And merged cells are not a good thing.
• 00:37 As a matter of fact, there's actually a button on the ribbon to do it.
• 00:39 But they can actually cause some real havoc with Excel formulas, copying and
• 00:43 pasting and all kinds of things.
• 00:44 So, what I'm gonna show you right now is a better way to do this,
• 00:47 is we're actually going to grab this block of cells here, and we'll right-click.
• 00:53 We'll go to Format, Cells.
• 00:55 And on the Alignment tab, there is an option to Center Across Selection.
• 01:01 And this is really important because it actually doesn't merge any cells, but
• 01:05 it still centers across.
• 01:07 The one part of this can make mess you up, though, is that when you select
• 01:10 the cell that looks like it has data, look what's in the formula bar.
• 01:14 There's nothing there.
• 01:15 That's actually showing up In the original cell.
• 01:18 This is the one that holds the data, it's just been centered across.
• 01:21 The key way that you can identify this look where the column breaks are.
• 01:25 There aren't any in here.
• 01:27 So we know that this has been centered across there.
• 01:29 We can also do more than one cell at a time the same way.
• 01:33 We can right click, Format Cells.
• 01:36 Go into the general, and Center Across Selection.
• 01:39 And that will allow us to center across those guys as well.
• 01:44 Now, obviously we can do things like change colors.
• 01:48 So we could center or select these guys here, and
• 01:51 we could go give these a nice, oh, I don't know.
• 01:52 How about a purple color?
• 01:54 There we go. There's a nice cell color there.
• 01:56 We could format in bold.
• 01:58 That's no problem.
• 01:59 What if we wanted to tip this data 45 degrees on its side?
• 02:02 Maybe that's something that we'd like to see in our report.
• 02:04 We can Right-Click, go to Format Cells, and
• 02:09 on that same Alignment tab, that's where this little dealie is over here is.
• 02:13 You can Left-Click and drag the text rotation.
• 02:17 And set it to 45 degrees.
• 02:18 And you can actually dial it up or
• 02:20 dial it down if you want to get really specific with it.
• 02:22 What'll end up happening here
• 02:25 is the the data will end up tipped on it's side over the columns.
• 02:28 Now, let's go and set our column Column widths here a little bit as well.
• 02:34 So we'll just drag in between here.
• 02:36 And this is one of the things that can get a little bit funny when you start doing
• 02:40 these kind of things, and you start bringing your columns nice and
• 02:43 close together, is you'll notice that these columns,
• 02:47 even though it only used to be about this wide, they sort of overlap.
• 02:50 But it's possible to get yourself into a situation where,
• 02:52 when you print this you'll lose the last three letters.
• 02:55 You do need them to stay inside your column, or
• 02:57 else they might not show up, okay?
• 02:59 So that's a way of dealing with that.
• 03:02 What about trying to center this guy vertically across this selection?
• 03:08 Let's go color this one right now.
• 03:10 I'd like to turn him 90 degrees, so I'm going to right-click and say Format,
• 03:13 Cells.
• 03:14 We'll say all right, this will be easy we'll change it to 90 degrees, and I'm
• 03:19 going to look for center across selection, and let's see what ends up happening here.
• 03:24 Well it centers it this way.
• 03:26 It doesn't center it vertically so
• 03:28 this is one instance where you do need to use merge cells.
• 03:32 So the way we do this is we right click, we go to format cells.
• 03:36 We'll click on merge cells and at this point what we'll do is we'll try and
• 03:42 move our slicer here or our little slider, but he won't go.
• 03:45 And the reason being is because the horizontal alignment isn't working for us,
• 03:49 so we're gonna set that to general, now we'll tip it on it's side and
• 03:54 we'll say okay.
• 03:57 You'll notice it's now tipped on its end, but
• 04:00 it's not really centered inside the box, and that's because we've centered it,
• 04:04 or actually we haven't centered it, we've left everything as general.
• 04:09 The vertical alignment is on the bottom, so
• 04:10 that means it's gonna touch the bottom of the cell.
• 04:13 What we can do here is we can center it horizontally, and
• 04:15 that will fit it in the middle of the cell.
• 04:17 If it's short text compared to everything else.
• 04:19 We might also want to center it vertically to make sure that it pops up and
• 04:23 that it actually sits in the middle of the box, as well.
• 04:25 So, if you'll notice now and
• 04:27 I actually make these columns taller, this still sits right in the center of them.
• 04:32 So, that's a little bit better.
• 04:34 I'm now gonna bring these rows back up to the shape that they were before,
• 04:38 by just double clicking on the line in-between here.
• 04:41 So you've seen a lot of formatting stuff that's going on in this particular area.
• 04:45 One more thing you may want to do here,
• 04:47 you may want to put borders around these guys as well.
• 04:51 So we're gonna come back in here into Format Cells and
• 04:55 we're gonna go to the Border tab.
• 04:57 And let's put an outline, and we'll also put some
• 05:01 internal lines in these as well and let's see what ends up happening.
• 05:05 You'll notice, because the text is already rotated, it now chops the color off from
• 05:10 the extras and it puts the little borders around there as well.
• 05:13 So the only other thing we may wanna do on this guy, is now go back and actually play
• 05:17 around with that centering to try and get them to center in exactly the right spot.
• 05:21 So let's go and center this horizontally, and
• 05:25 see if that makes the change to what's going on.
• 05:27 There we go, and now we've got these things in the middle of those boxes.
• 05:30 So lots of fun that we can play with formatting.
• 05:32 Of course, you can also go and you can change your font sizes here as well,
• 05:36 make this 18 point.
• 05:38 You can make them bold, all kinds of things.
• 05:41 Lots of different formatting options here.
• 05:43 And if you ever wanna get rid of all of them, and
• 05:45 start over, all you need to do is highlight everything here, and
• 05:49 come over to the tab on the end here where the eraser is.
• 05:54 You can say clear formats and it'll set it right back to what it was to begin with.

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