Excel in Office – Podcasts 017 and 018
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In Episode 17 of the Excel in Office podcast, we look at the following topics:
Applying Number format
Numbers can have colors and fonts, but there are many different other ways that numbers can be formatted: number, currency, accounting, date, time, percentage, fraction, scientific, text and special. We’ll have a look at the various number formatting and see what the differences are between them.
Applying borders
You can put borders around cells, but the choice is not just: have a border, or not. Yes, there are a number of standard borders, such as top, right, bottom and left, but you can also use the Format Cells dialog box to create customized borders, including different thickness and colors. You can also add diagonal borders and well, so you can have Xs in the background of each cell.
Applying cell styles
Styles are perhaps less used in Excel than they are in Word, but they can save a lot of time. Styles can encompass not only colors, borders and number formats, but also alignments and fonts. The advantage of styles is that you can add similar styling to groups of cells, but you can also change all of those cells at once by changing the style.
Using Format Painter
Suppose you have the perfect style – you have put your font, underlining and background exactly as you want, and you want to duplicate it in another cell. You can do this using Copy then Paste Formats, but a quick way of doing this is using the Format Painter. Let’s find out how.
We’ll get into much more detail in the podcast. To listen to it, press the Play button below.
In Episode 18 of the Excel in Office podcast, we look at the following topics:
Changing text to WordArt
If you want to have something bigger than a title, you can create WordArt. While it is more often used in Word, you can use up to 20 different styles. We’ll find out how.
Applying conditional formatting – highlighting
Have you got a really big spreadsheet, and can’t see the word for the trees? Conditional Formatting allows you to highlight parts of your data – maybe the highest or the lowest values, or the top 10%. Alternatively, you could highlight cells that contain certain words. And one of the best things is: if the value changes, the formatting changes as well.
Conditional formatting is very versatile, and easy to use. Let’s find out how.
Applying conditional formatting – Bars, Scales and Sets
However, highlighting cells in a single value is not the only way you can use conditional formatting. You can also add bars in the background, which shows how big the values are. Maybe you want a RAG rating, so your cells are highlighted in the colors of a traffic light. Or maybe you want icons to be included, based on the value.
These are other ways in which conditional formatting can be used. Let’s see it in action.
We’ll get into much more detail in the podcast. To listen to it, press the Play button below.
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