John Walkenbach's Favorite Excel 2010 Tips and Tricks

Chapter 3. Formatting

Excel has lots of formatting options to make your work look good. In this part, you'll find tips that cover formatting numbers, dates, times, text, and many other aspects of Excel.

Tips and Where to Find Them

• Tip 46 Using the Mini Toolbar 109

• Tip 47 Indenting Cell Contents 110

• Tip 48 Quick Number Formatting 112

• Tip 49 Creating Custom Number Formats 113

• Tip 50 Using Custom Number Formats to Scale Values 117

• Tip 51 Using Custom Date and Time Formatting 119

• Tip 52 Examining Some Useful Custom Number Formats 120

• Tip 53 Updating Old Fonts 123

• Tip 54 Understanding Conditional Formatting Visualization 125

• Tip 55 Showing Text and a Value in a Cell 128

• Tip 56 Merging Cells 130

• Tip 57 Formatting Individual Characters in a Cell 131

• Tip 58 Displaying Times That Exceed 24 Hours 132

• Tip 59 Fixing Non-Numeric Numbers 134

• Tip 60 Adding a Frame to a Range 135

• Tip 61 Dealing with Gridlines, Borders, and Underlines 136

• Tip 62 Inserting a Watermark 138

• Tip 63 Adding a Background Image to a Worksheet 140

• Tip 64 Wrapping Text in a Cell 141

• Tip 65 Seeing All Characters in a Font 143

• Tip 66 Entering Special Characters 145

• Tip 67 Using Named Styles 147

Using the Mini Toolbar

Excel 2007 introduced a new user interface element known as the Mini Toolbar. This little pop-up toolbar appears whenever you right-click an object (a range of cells, a chart legend, or a shape, for example). The Mini Toolbar appears above the shortcut menu and contains icons that are normally found on the Home tab. Figure 46-1 hows the ...