Formatting Cell Content
AS YOU TYPE ALONG, adding content to cells, Excel’s default settings take effect. Normally, this is fine, left-aligning your text, right-aligning your numeric content, applying the standard 11 point Calibri font to the content, and formatting dates, times, and other content automatically. When your needs go beyond these defaults, or if you want to tweak them a bit, it’s handy to know the most effective ways to change the formatting of one or more cells so that your content looks and works the way you want it to—everything you need is at your fingertips, literally.
Applying Fonts, Sizes, Styles, and Text Color
Using the Home tab, shown in Figure 5-17, you can change the appearance of any cell or range of cells with just a few clicks. Beginning with the Font group, after selecting the cells to which the formatting should apply, you can apply the following changes:
Figure 5-17. The Home tab offers everything you need to change the appearance of your worksheet content.
Font. The default is Calibri, and if you click the drop-down arrow, you can choose from any of the fonts installed on your computer, making your selection from the graphic samples that appear in the menu, as shown in Figure 5-18.
Figure 5-18. Pick a font based on the graphic samples in the Font menu.
Size. This defaults to 11 points (based on 72 points per inch). Pick a larger or smaller number to make your content larger or smaller.
Increase or Decrease Font Size. These two A icons (the bigger one is the Increase Font Size button, as you’d imagine) allow you to make content bigger or smaller, in two-point increments for each click of the button. These are handy to use when you don’t know, for example, that you need 24-point text, but will recognize the right size when you see it applied.
Bold, Italic, and Underline. These three styles (represented by the B, I, and U buttons) add emphasis.
Font Color. The A on top of a color block (red by default) opens a palette of colors drawn from various Office Themes (showing a series of compatible shades) or Standard colors (see Figure 5-19). The More Colors link opens a larger palette in the Colors dialog box, as shown in Figure 5-20, through two tabs—Standard and Custom—and literally millions of color choices.
Figure 5-19. Utilizing a feature called Live Preview, you can mouse over the palette to see the selected cells displayed in any color available through the palette.
Figure 5-20. The Colors dialog box offers over a million shades, through the Standard and Custom tabs. Pick a color and click OK.
Adding Borders and Shading
Continuing with the options available in the Font group of the Home tab, you can apply the following to selected cells—bear in mind these changes apply to the cells, rather than to the text or numbers within them. As shown in row 3 of Figure 5-21, the Fill Color and Borders tools fill the cells with color and apply a custom border.
To apply these effects, select the cells, and click the drop-down arrows next to each of the buttons:
Fill Color. This button presents a palette, much like the Font Color button. You can pick from Office Themes colors, or Standard colors, or click More Colors to open the dialog box shown in Figure 5-22.
Figure 5-22. Apply borders to one or more sides of a single cell or range of cells.
Borders. Click the arrow next to this button (the button shows the last border applied, or if not used yet, the bottom border) to display the menu shown in Figure 5-22.
Applying Borders with a Drawing Tool
The Draw Borders section of the Borders menu offers tools for using a drawing tool to apply borders. You can choose the drawn border colors and styles, using the palettes displayed by choosing the Line Color and Line Style commands.
More Borders. This command, found at the foot of the Borders menu, opens a dialog box through which you can completely customize the sides of the cells to be given a border, including the thickness, style, and color of the borders. Figure 5-23 shows the Format Cells dialog box, open to the Border tab. You’ll be seeing more of this dialog box and its other tabs as we move through the rest of this chapter.
Figure 5-23. The Border tab in the Format Cells dialog box offers true border customization.
Working with Alignment and Spacing
Moving across the Home tab, the next group is called Alignment—and that’s what its commands control for your worksheet cells and their content. You can choose how content is aligned horizontally and vertically, whether or not the content is indented, and even put content on a variety of angles. To use these tools (shown and identified in Figure 5-24), select the cells to which the changes should apply, and make your choice from the following buttons:
Figure 5-24. Two rows of tools populate the Alignment group of the Home tab, controlling how content lines up within your worksheet cells.
Vertical Alignment. Use the Top, Middle, or Bottom Align buttons to control how the content of selected cells lines up vertically. Bottom alignment is the default.
Orientation. Need to put your column headings at an angle? Long headings can take up less horizontal space if they’re at an angle, as shown in Figure 5-25.
Figure 5-25. Angle your cells’ content using the five choices on the Orientation palette.
Alignment Options in the Format Cells Dialog Box
The Format Cell Alignment command opens the Format Cells dialog box, open to the Alignment tab (shown in Figure 5-26). Pick an exact angle for your content, using the half-clock on the right, and use alignment, control, and text direction options on the left side of the dialog box. These are mostly repetitions of what’s available on the Home tab’s Alignment group.
Figure 5-26. The Alignment tab of the Format Cells dialog box offers more tools to do the same things you can do from the Home tab.
Wrap Text. Click this button to tell Excel to allow wrapping within the selected cells. This can come in handy for cells that will contain long strings of text—sentences, product descriptions, survey comments, anything longer than a couple of words, where you don’t want the column to have to be very wide to accommodate the full display of the text.
Horizontal Alignment. Choose from Align Text Left, Center, and Align Text Right buttons, to align cell content to the sides or center of the selected cells.
Indent. You can indent cell content, moving it to the right within the cell with each click of the Increase Indent button. The Decrease Indent button moves the text back to the left.
Merge & Center. This button works to toggle merging of selected cells on and off, and also displays a menu, as shown in Figure 5-27. The most common use of this button is to merge a series of cells to make a single title cell above a series of columns. The list offers commands to Merge Across (to merge a horizontal series of cells), Merge Cells (to merge a block of cells, including vertical ranges), and Unmerge Cells, which removes the merge and returns the cells to their individual states.
Figure 5-27. Merge & Center a title, using the button or this handy list of options.
