Changing Excel styles to bamboozle your colleagues

So you've created a simple worksheet, and are about to email it to your colleague Chris for review:

Your humble spreadsheet.

But it's a bank holiday tomorrow, you're feeling a bit restless, and you know Chris is a bit nervous about using Excel, so you decide to add a few features.  First you arrange for all the cells to turn inexplicably orange:

Your worksheet has been tango'ed.

Next, you arrange to show:

• Any text as Bazinga;
• Any numbers with the wrong sign; and
• Any zeroes as Zilch

So now you get:

Your workbook is now ready to be emailed!

So how to achieve these effects?  Well, every cell in Excel has got a style attached to it.  You can see these styles by clicking here:

Click to change the styles in a workbook.

Unless you've changed the formatting for a cell, it will use the default Normal style - which you can change:

Right-click on the Normal style and choose to modify it.

Now change the formatting used by this style:

Click on the button shown to change the format used for the selected style.

To get the orange effect, I just changed the fill colour:

Choose the Fill tab and set a background colour.

For the number formats, I chose the Number tab and typed in a custom number format:

See below for what this format means.

The four parts of the number format entered are as follows: