Formatting cells in Excel

Till now we have learned how to navigate Excel spreadsheets, resize rows and columns, and format numbers. Then how does the Excel experts make their sheets look so beautiful? To answer that question, we will have a look at the options that Excel includes for cell formatting.

Basic text formatting

If we select any of the cell and head to the Home tab on the Ribbon, we will get to see some of the basic formatting options at the top of the ribbon:
  • Font style and size
  • Bold
  • Underline, and Italics
  • And borders
Of particular note are the font color and cell background color drop-downs, which allow us to style cells as we see we want:
To the right, we will see a number of paragraph options, including:
  • Cell vertical alignment (top, middle, or bottom)
  • Horizontal alignment (left, right, and center)
  • And indentation
The "wrap text" option on this page allows one to toggle text wrapping within a cell on or off. If toggled on, text within a cell will automatically wrap to multiple lines rather than being cut off or just appearing on one line:
And, the "merge and center" button on this same tab allows us to merge multiple cells together in order to create headers. Try selecting a block of cells and hitting the "Merge" button so as to transform it into one larger block. We usually use this option on the chart top, like so:

How do we format our Excel spreadsheets

Have a look at the below spreadsheet, which we have formatted using the standard procedure. Of course, formatting is totally subjective — so you can give your spreadsheet whatever look you want — but consider the following as an inspiration from where you might want to start.
In the above sheet, we have:
  • Formatted column headings that have bold styling and a light blue cell background for easy viewing. We have also added a thick white border to the cells to differentiate them from each other.
  • Used Merge and Center on top of the column headings, wherever appropriate.Used appropriate number formats to more accurately represent the quantities we are analyzing.
  • Indented titles appropriately in the first column of our data are set to represent the various components of different quantities. For example, Units sold and Sale price per unit are both the components of Revenue, so they are indented below it to represent the dependency.
  • Used preset Cell Styles to represent key assumptions and outputs on our spreadsheet.

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