Using Microsoft Excel Cell Style

Excel contains a very wide variety of formats that you can apply to your cells. Naturally, when you create your worksheets you want your formatting to be consistent. Cell Styles offer an excellent way of achieving this.

Cell Styles are located in the Style group of the Home Tab of the Ribbon. When you click the Cell Styles button the Cell Styles gallery is revealed. The gallery provides a live preview; when you hover any of the styles, the current selection within your worksheets changes, giving you a preview of what your data will look like if you choose that particular style.

The first benefit of using styles is that you apply several formats in one operation. For example, say we choose the style called “Heading One”; we automatically change the size, alignment and colour of our text. We can speed up the formatting process even further by using the Format Painter to copy styles into the other cells or even other worksheets. Simply highlight an area that already has a cell style applied, double-click on the Format Painter to make sure it stays highlighted then drag across the appropriate range(s) of cells. When you have finished, click once on the Format Painter to deactivate it.

Having applied cell styles to various parts of a workbook, you can take advantage of the most important benefit offered by Cell Styles; if you modify the attributes associated with any style used in a workbook, the formatting of all cells to which the style has been applied will automatically be updated.

As for modifying the defintion of a style, since we’re not directly applying formats to any of the cells, it doesn’t matter which cells are highlighted. To modify the a style’s attributes, click on the Cell Styles button, right click on the name of the style and then choose “Modify”. You will then be offered the six categories of formats which can be included in a style: Number, Alignment, Font, Border, Fill and Protection. The list is pretty comprehensive and includes just about everything that Excel has to offer in the way of formatting.

You now have the facility of activating and deactivating categories as necessary. Any categories that do not apply to a particular style can simply remain inactive (i.e., checkbox not ticked). Next, click on each relevant category and make your selections. When you click OK to confirm these changes, all cells to which the style has been applied will be automatically updated.

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