Formatting

Quick reference

• 00:04 >> In this video we're gonna look at the basics of formatting cells.
• 00:08 And this is one of the things that every user loves to do when they actually
• 00:11 start working with Excel, is make their data look a little prettier.
• 00:14 Because, let's face it, when we put a report in front of someone, if it looks
• 00:18 like it does right now on my screen, nobody's gonna be really impressed.
• 00:22 So, the idea behind formatting is that formatting can be applied
• 00:26 to individual cells or to a group of cells all
• 00:29 at once when you select multiple cells before you actually apply those formats.
• 00:33 We have a variety of different formats that we can use.
• 00:38 Many of them are found on the font tab.
• 00:39 So let's go and take a look at our sports store inventory here.
• 00:42 If I wanted to change the size on this I could go and click on this little drop
• 00:45 down here and change it to a 24 point font which makes it nice and big.
• 00:50 I could set it to bold and maybe italics,
• 00:52 and I could even change the font to something else.
• 00:54 That one looks really bold, so let's give that a shot.
• 00:57 So there we go.
• 00:58 We now have a really nice header for our sports store inventory.
• 01:02 I could do something, of course,
• 01:03 completely different with the with the cell below it.
• 01:05 I could go and try this other font.
• 01:08 And I'm not sure what fonts you have on your system.
• 01:10 They vary sometimes between things.
• 01:12 So you could try bold and italics and underline.
• 01:16 Maybe even change the font size or shade here to, how about a dark green?
• 01:20 That's something a little bit different.
• 01:22 There we go.
• 01:23 So, now we've got a little bit of different formatting here.
• 01:27 What about selecting entire sets of cells and ranges that we wanna actually format?
• 01:33 For example, if I wanted to take this table and
• 01:35 I wanted to apply a background to all these cells at once.
• 01:39 I wanna use a fill color, like something like a nice big purple here.
• 01:44 And I wanted to change the font so
• 01:45 that I could still see it, I could change the font to white.
• 01:49 I could make the font size just a little bit bigger by clicking on this
• 01:53 icon right here.
• 01:54 And that'll actually increase the font size a bit.
• 01:56 But one of the things I've noticed at this point now is that I've lost the remaining
• 02:01 letters in quantity.
• 02:03 So I can fix that by going up to my columns.
• 02:07 And right between them,
• 02:07 you'll notice that the cursor changes to this different shape.
• 02:11 It has an arrow, or arrows, that point it two directions.
• 02:14 If I left click and drag, it will actually allow me to open that up so
• 02:19 that I can actually get the entire word.
• 02:21 So that's how we make these columns bigger.
• 02:22 And the same works for rows as well.
• 02:24 We could drag between two rows.
• 02:27 One thing that's interesting about this, though,
• 02:29 is that sometimes you might not know exactly how wide you want something to be.
• 02:33 And you can actually deal with that by going over here and double-clicking.
• 02:37 And that'll actually expand it or
• 02:39 shrink it to exactly what it is needed in that particular case.
• 02:43 Now what if I wanted to put a border around this?
• 02:46 I could do that in a few different ways.
• 02:48 There's a lot of different options for borders here.
• 02:50 I could put a thick border around it.
• 02:52 That might make it look kinda nice.
• 02:54 Or maybe I wanted to get a little bit more granular with things.
• 02:58 I could go and grab this one and say, you know, let's put all borders on this, and
• 03:01 it'll put borders around the insides.
• 03:05 If I wanted to get a little bit more into even more information here,
• 03:10 and I wanted to try and format things in different ways and
• 03:13 be a little bit more complex all at once, I have a really powerful little
• 03:16 dialogue as well that I can access by right-clicking and going to format cells.
• 03:21 The fastest way to get there is actually to press command one because then
• 03:25 you don't have to take your hands off the keyboard to grab the mouse.
• 03:28 But when you do this, and you click on Format Cells,
• 03:31 you'll notice that you actually have a whole bunch of options here.
• 03:34 We've got number options where we could select, I've only selected this
• 03:38 one cell here, but I could change to a different number style.
• 03:42 Say I wanted to use a different numeric style,
• 03:46 there's all kinds of different ones.
• 03:47 Most of these ones have dollar signs, but you can find different ones like Yen,
• 03:52 I believe this is, that we could format it and show it a little bit differently.
• 03:57 We can change the alignment of the cell here as well.
• 04:01 Lot of different options in horizontal and vertical alignment as well,
• 04:04 if I wanted to actually change those around.
• 04:06 Or I could change the angle of the text that was gonna show up in this cell.
• 04:10 I can change the fonts in here as well, just like I could from the Font tab.
• 04:13 But I can do all this controlling in one place, even my borders.
• 04:18 I could change the fill in here as well.
• 04:20 So if I look at the background color and I wanted to change it to orange for
• 04:23 this one specific cell, I could do that.
• 04:25 And now everything that I've set in this one dialogue,
• 04:28 when I say OK, will take place on this particular cell.
• 04:32 You can see that it's got the Yen symbol, it's been rotated to the angle that I put
• 04:35 it at, it's got orange, it's got borders, all of that stuff is in one place.
• 04:40 If I don't like this,
• 04:41 I say man, that's really not good, I can copy the formats from another cell.
• 04:46 And to do that, we can use this little paintbrush.
• 04:48 We can click on it and come back and paste those formats.
• 04:52 It'll take the format from what I had and
• 04:54 put it back over top of what was already there.
• 04:57 So, really good stuff.
• 05:00 Most of the really common commands that you wanna use for
• 05:03 formatting are found on the home tab.
• 05:05 You can see your number styles are over here.
• 05:07 Really common formats are listed here.
• 05:09 Anything else you'd have to click More, and it will actually launch you into
• 05:12 the number dialogue box of the format cells dialogue.
• 05:17 So for the most part you're gonna find most of the commands available here.
• 05:20 But if you're looking for more robust,
• 05:22 you basically just go right click, format cells.
• 05:24 Or, if you wanna be really fast,
• 05:25 press command one on the cell that you selected and it'll take you
• 05:28 right into where you can actually do some more detailed work and set things up.
• 05:32 And I encourage you to play around and come up with your own kind of formatting
• 05:34 styles that you like that you think makes your data really sing.

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