This page has 0 threads | Add post

Blogs

Finding our blogs useful? Please consider helping us to share more!

Using Styles in Microsoft Excel Part one of a two-part series of blogs
Constantly formatting cells in the same way can be one of the most tedious and time-consuming tasks in Excel. This blog teaches you how to use styles so that you can quickly apply consistent formatting across a range of cells. Using Styles in Microsoft Excel (this blog) Creating and Modifying Custom Styles

Using Styles in Microsoft Excel

Part one of a two-part series of blogs

Constantly formatting cells in the same way can be one of the most tedious and time-consuming tasks in Excel. This blog teaches you how to use styles so that you can quickly apply consistent formatting across a range of cells.

Using Styles in Microsoft Excel (this blog)
Creating and Modifying Custom Styles

Posted by Andrew Gould on 24 February 2012

Using Styles in Microsoft Excel

Formatting worksheets can be one of the most tedious tasks in Excel, particularly if you're forced to replicate your organisation's standard colours and font schemes. Using styles is a fantastic way to save masses of time when formatting a worksheet as you can apply a whole range of formatting options to cells with a couple of clicks of the mouse.

A style is simply a collection of formatting options, such as font size, cell colour and border style settings, saved with a sensible name and which can be applied to cells quickly.

You can see a video tutorial covering how to use styles in Excel workbooks by clicking here, or a full range of Excel training courses and resources here.

Viewing Existing Styles

Every new workbook that you create contains a number of existing styles which you might find useful. Seeing which styles you have available depends on which version of Excel you are using.

In Excel 2007 and 2010, from the ribbon choose: Home -> Cell Styles


The option might be minimised like this if your screen is quite narrow...	...or it might be expanded like this if your screen is fairly wide.

In Excel 2003, from the menu choose: Format -> Styles...

You can also press ALT + ' (apostrophe) to display this dialog box. You can see a list of styles in the drop down list highlighted here.

Notice that the Normal style is applied to cells by default. We'll use this to our advantage later.

Adding the Style List to a Toolbar in Excel 2003

To make life easier in Excel 2003 you can add the style list to an existing toolbar to avoid having to open a dialog box each time. The basic process is:

From the menu select: Tools -> Customize...
On the dialog box, select the Commands tab.
From the list of categories on the left, select Format.

From the list of categories select Format, and then look for the Style: drop list on the right hand side.

Click and drag the Style: drop down list from the dialog box and drop it onto an existing toolbar.

Look for the vertical black line which shows where the drop down list will be inserted.

Close the dialog box and you should now have an easy way to see the available styles in the workbook.

You now have an easy way to select styles in Excel 2003.

Applying a Style to Cells

To apply an existing style you simply need to select a cell or cells and then select one of the styles from the list.

Select the cells you want to apply the style to.

Here we're going to apply a heading style to the selected cells.

From the ribbon or toolbar select the style you want to apply to the selected cells.

Here we're applying the Heading 2 style in Excel 2010.

The selected cells should now be formatted according to the options contained within the style.

This style makes the font larger, blue and bold, and adds a blue bottom border to each cell.

If you have the Style list on a toolbar in Excel 2003 you can press ALT + ' to access it, and then type in the first letter of the style name you want to apply, or use the arrow keys to scroll through the list. When you've highlighted the style you want, press Enter to apply it to the selected cell.

Removing Styles

You can't technically remove a style from a cell - every cell uses a style. Remember that we earlier pointed out that each cell uses the Normal style by default? To remove the formatting applied by a style you can simply set the cells back to using the Normal style.

Apply the Normal style to remove the formatting applied by other styles.

What's Next?

Using existing styles is fine as long as you're happy with the limited choices that you have. It's more likely that you'll want to create your own custom styles, perhaps to fit in with a corporate colour scheme. Read the next part of this blog series to find out how to do this.

Parts of this blog
Using Styles in Microsoft Excel (this blog) Creating and Modifying Custom Styles

Some other pages relevant to the above blogs include:

Microsoft Excel training

This blog has 0 threads

Add a new post

Book any course as classroom, onsite or online training, or as one-to-one consultancy

Free resources

Paid services

Getting help

Where we are

Where you are

Online

Transparent reviews

Delivery of courses

Nicer to work with

Reliable and established

Our training courses

C#

Excel

MySQL

Power Apps

Power Automate

Power BI and DAX

Python

Report Builder

SQL

SQL Server

VBA Macros

Other training resources

Blogs

Exercises

YouTube tutorials

YouTube shorts

Test your skills

Consultancy

Courseware

Self-paced courses

Newsletters

Publications

Our training venues

London

Manchester

Across the UK

At your site

Online

Why we are different

Hundreds of published reviews

Small class sizes

Outstanding courseware

Online classroom

(Almost) no cancellations

Wise Owl trainers only

Genuine integrity

Invoices after training

30+ years of Wise Owl

Our top 100 clients

BLOGS BY TOPIC

BLOGS BY AUTHOR

Using Styles in Microsoft Excel

Viewing Existing Styles

Adding the Style List to a Toolbar in Excel 2003

Applying a Style to Cells

Removing Styles

What's Next?

Head office

London

Manchester