Excel 2003 for Starters: The Missing Manual

Smart Ways to Apply Formatting

You've now had a comprehensive tour of Excel's formatting features. But, of course, just because the features are there doesn't mean they're easy to use. You can chew up hours digging through the different options and applying a full range of formatting choices to each and every cell. Fortunately, Excel also includes a few time-savers that let you speed up many formatting tasks. The final few sections of this chapter introduce these features. You'll see how to skip the Format Cells dialog box with a few toolbar tricks, how to copy and standardize formatting with Styles and the Format Painter, and how to add a little built-in graphical intelligence to your worksheet with conditional formatting.

Shortcuts with the Toolbars

To control cell formatting, you need to jump between your worksheet and the Format Cells dialog box, which is time-consuming. But what if there were a way to apply basic formatting without jumping to a new window? In fact, Excel provides just such a handy shortcut with its Formatting toolbar.

The Formatting toolbar can't duplicate every feature in the Format Cells dialog box. But it does do the next best thing: it lets you apply the most common types of formatting with one or two quick mouse clicks.

Note

The Formatting toolbar usually appears at the top of the Excel window. If you've lost yours, just select View → Toolbars → Formatting from the menu.

Using the Formatting toolbar is similar to using the Format Cells dialog box. First, move ...