Office 2008 for Macintosh: The Missing Manual

Chapter 13. Formatting and Charts

When you enter information in an Excel 2008 spreadsheet, your text appears in crisp, 10-point Verdana type. Serviceable, but do spreadsheets have to look so drab? Excel comes packed with formatting tools that let you show off your design genius and take spreadsheets from blah to brilliant.

For starters, Excel has a broad selection of fonts, colors, and borders to make your sheets stand out. Excel can also import pictures (either clip art provided by Microsoft or images of your own) and movies. You can even use Excel’s drawing tools to create your own works of art.

The only reason many people put up with the chore of creating a spreadsheet in the first place is to produce charts. Whether you call them charts or graphs, they’re graphical representations of lots of little bits of data—data that you first have to organize in a spreadsheet. Once those numbers are in place, the stage is set for a modern miracle: from the stultifying columns of numbers springs a gorgeous chart, dramatically revealing the hidden pattern behind the numbers. Not all charts are gorgeous, but they all reveal patterns and trends in the data that can be impossible to see in other ways.

If you’ve prepared your spreadsheet properly, creating a chart in Excel 2008 is a quick and easy process—and the results can be truly eye-popping thanks to the new OfficeArt graphics engine. The new Elements Gallery makes the process of previewing the dozens of chart styles, and inserting charts far ...