Creating Styles of Your Own

Excel makes it extremely easy to create new styles for your spreadsheet. When creating a new style, you can either.

Build it by modifying the attributes of one of the predefined styles. You select the basic style in the Style dialog box and then make all the necessary changes to the number format, font, alignment, borders, shading, and protection attributes in the Format Cells dialog box required by the new style.

Create it from an example cell. To create a style by example, you choose a sample cell (which should contain a typical data entry) and then format it with all the attributes (number format, font, alignment, borders, shading, and protection) that you want used in the new style.

Follow along with the steps for creating a new Title Style for instantly formatting the headings for tables of data in a new spreadsheet:

1. Select a cell to use as the sample cell in a new workbook, make a typical data entry in it, and then manually format the cell with all the attributes you want the new style to assign.
   To format the cell with the desired attributes, use the buttons on the Formatting toolbar or the controls in the Format Cells dialog box (Ctrl+1).
   
   
2. Choose Format> Style to open the Style dialog box and then select the Style Name text box and replace Normal with the unique name you want to give the new style.
   As soon as you begin typing in the new style name, the Style Includes area in the Style dialog box changes to a Style Includes (By Example) area that lists all the attributes that your new style will use.
   
   
3. Click OK to close the Style dialog box and complete the creation of your new style.

After creating a new style, you can apply its formatting to a cell selection (single range or noncontiguous selection) in the worksheet by opening the Style dialog box (Format> Style), selecting the name of the style in the Style Name drop-down list box, and clicking OK. Of course, you can make applying a style a heck of a lot easier by adding a Style drop-down list box to the Formatting toolbar.

If you create a custom style that you rely on all the time, consider assigning it to a button that you add either to the Formatting toolbar or to some custom toolbar. That way, you can format a cell selection with the style by clicking its button. To do this, create a keystroke macro that selects the custom style and then assign this macro to a Custom button and add this button to one of the toolbars.