Excel Style Formatting

When it comes to looks, everyone wants to be in style. When it comes to getting your worksheets to look their best, you can facilitate their formatting by using Excel's styles. Styles are perfect for applying standard formatting to many cell ranges across the spreadsheet. What makes them so great is that should you need to tweak their formatting a bit, you simply make the changes to the style itself and those changes are instantly updated in every cell to which that style is applied. Excel styles can regulate any of the following formatting attributes in a cell:

• Number to determine which number format is used. (If the cell contains a text entry, the Number aspect of the style is ignored.)
  
  
• Alignment to determine what kind of horizontal and vertical text alignment, text control (wrap text or shrink to fit), or text direction is used.
  
  
• Font to determine what font, font style, font size, attributes (underline, strikethrough, superscript, or subscript), or font color is used.
  
  
• Border to determine what kind of border (including line style and color), if any, is used.
  
  
• Patterns to determine what kind of cell shading, if any, is used.
  
  
• Protection to determine the status (on or off) of the Locked and Hidden cell protection attributes.

This technique gives you vital information on how to use and customize the six predefined styles that are immediately available to you in any workbook you open as well as how to create your own custom styles. Finally, you find out how to copy your favorite custom styles from one workbook to another so that you don't have to waste time reinventing a style.