Formatting

Quick reference

• 00:04 Now, what generally happens after people enter data into a spreadsheet is they
• 00:08 start formatting it to make it look a little bit nicer.
• 00:11 Now, I'm not going to guarantee you that what I'm about to build is
• 00:14 going to be pretty, but we are going to play around with some formatting controls.
• 00:17 And we're going to start right here with the header of my little data set for
• 00:21 Sports Store Inventory.
• 00:23 I want to make this bold and bigger.
• 00:25 So right up here on the Home tab,
• 00:27 you'll find a whole bunch of different formatting commands.
• 00:30 Font group is right here, and that's where we can find bold.
• 00:34 And we can also change the size by dialing it up with the increase font size.
• 00:38 So I'm going to and take that up a few steps to 16.
• 00:41 And that looks pretty good, I'm happy with that.
• 00:43 So I'm going to move down to the subheading of ball inventory.
• 00:47 And I think on this one, I'm going to change it to italics.
• 00:51 And I'm going to increase the font size a couple of steps to 14 there, but
• 00:54 this one feels like it needs a different font.
• 00:56 So from my drop-down box right here, I'm going to go and pick something exciting.
• 01:01 How about ALGERIAN?
• 01:01 That looks really fancy.
• 01:03 So there we go.
• 01:05 All right, it needs more though.
• 01:06 I feel like I want to add some color.
• 01:08 So I'm going to go and choose to use a green font for that as well, there we go.
• 01:13 As I say, I didn't promise this was going to be pretty,
• 01:16 I'm just fooling around with different color combinations.
• 01:19 One of the things that we've done so far is that we've applied all of our
• 01:23 formatting to individual cells, can we do groups of cells?
• 01:26 Well, absolutely, let me select the header here from my data table.
• 01:30 And I'm going to change this one.
• 01:32 I'm going to use, how about a nice purple?
• 01:35 Now, the problem is, of course, you can't really read the text in here.
• 01:39 So let me just change the text to white.
• 01:42 There we go, that's better.
• 01:44 And I'll make it bold, and then maybe I'll grab these two cells here,
• 01:49 and we'll use the alignment group to center them.
• 01:52 There we go, that's better.
• 01:54 And then I think what I'm going to do is I'm also going to add some
• 01:56 borders to this.
• 01:57 So I'm going to add a nice big thick outside border here, and another thick
• 02:02 outside border around it, so that I get a nice big separated looking table there.
• 02:08 Awesome, finally, here's what I'm going to do, is I'm going to go and
• 02:12 change the background color on this to a little peachy color, and there we are.
• 02:16 Now, the thing I want you to recognize about this is that there's one thing I
• 02:20 didn't call out, and it has to do with working with colors, and actually,
• 02:24 any kind of style or visual format you apply to these things.
• 02:28 It's called Live Preview, and here's how it works.
• 02:31 When I look at one of these galleries,
• 02:32 maybe I decide I don't really like this peachy color.
• 02:35 So I'm going to take a look and
• 02:36 I'm going to mouse over the different things here.
• 02:38 And if you look, I haven't clicked on anything and yet
• 02:41 you can see the changes happening in that cost column down below.
• 02:44 So I can come back here and go, wait, you know what, that, that one right there,
• 02:48 Gold, Accent 4, Lighter 40%, now that is the one that's speaking to me right now.
• 02:52 So I'm just going to go click on it now that I've seen a live preview of it, okay?
• 02:56 So we can always change things, of course, but live preview is pretty awesome.
• 02:59 It happens with fonts, it happens with virtually every visual element.
• 03:03 Now, another component that I might want to do is I might want to format some
• 03:07 values here.
• 03:08 We have some pre-built in number formatting styles at the top here.
• 03:12 So I can go and say, let's use a comma style, and
• 03:14 you'll see that it actually indents it a little bit.
• 03:17 Or maybe I want to use a number style and put numbers on it.
• 03:20 Not really crazy about that one, so
• 03:22 what I'm going to do is I'm actually just going to do a little undo on that one.
• 03:25 But what if I want to get even more granular?
• 03:29 For this, we need the Format Cells dialog, okay?
• 03:33 So in order to get to that, there's two different ways.
• 03:36 We can get there by clicking on one of the dialog box launchers,
• 03:40 which will take us directly into the tab of the Format Cells dialog.
• 03:43 And you'll see that all the little dropdowns and things that we have,
• 03:46 they're all in here.
• 03:47 They're just not maybe quite as pretty as what they are on the ribbon.
• 03:50 We also have different tabs to get to the alignment for things like centering and
• 03:55 whatnot and number formats.
• 03:56 The faster way to get in there, though, is just right-click on
• 04:00 whatever you're working on, and choose Format Cells from the context menu.
• 04:04 And that will take us into the same dialog, but
• 04:06 it won't necessarily select the correct tab for you, okay?
• 04:10 That's the real tricky part that you want to be a little bit careful of when
• 04:13 you're playing around with this.
• 04:15 But if you take a look here, inside my Accounting format that I have right now,
• 04:19 which I picked up from comma, I've got no symbol here, but I can actually change to
• 04:24 any kinds of crazy symbol stuff that I actually want in this case.
• 04:27 I can set it to currencies with different symbols.
• 04:30 I can set it to time formats or scientific notation, all kinds of wild and
• 04:35 wonderful things.
• 04:36 And later, I'll even show you how you can build custom number formats as well.
• 04:41 So the other nice thing about that Format Cells dialog you might want to actually
• 04:45 realize as well is that if you go in here, go to Format Cells, again,
• 04:49 you'll notice that we have the ability to control borders.
• 04:53 So things that may not be visible through the user interface, like,
• 04:57 say, a dotted line.
• 04:59 Maybe I want to put that down on the left-hand side and in the middle here.
• 05:03 And what you can see now is that we actually get a dotted line.
• 05:06 You're not going to find those kind of commands in this menu.
• 05:09 So you have a little bit more of ability to get a little bit more granular.
• 05:12 Format Cells dialog is awesome.
• 05:14 So start by doing your formatting from the Home tabs.
• 05:16 And then to get it really dialed in for specific cells, right-click and
• 05:20 go into your Format Cells option and you'll find that you have the ability
• 05:24 to make everything look exactly the way you want.

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