Excel 2010 Made Simple

Chapter 5

For Appearance's Sake: Formatting Your Data

Now that you've gotten a handle on some of the ways you can make all that data work for you, through Excel's functions and your own self-devised formulas, you'll want to go on and think about how all those results should look— because you're likely to have to show your work to someone else, and you know what they say about first impressions. Excel makes a huge assortment of formatting options available to its users, and we're going to take a look at some of these important, easy-to-apply options now.

What Formatting Does (and Doesn't Do)

The first thing you need to bear in mind about formatting in Excel is that when you dab at its palette of possibilities you're not “doing” anything to the ...