The look and feel of your workbook has a lot to do with the formatting choices
you make. For example, let's add some formatting to this fitness chart.
That will make it easier to read and more visually appealing. We'll start by
selecting the cell that contains "Fitness progress chart" and making the text bigger.
In the Font group on the Home tab, locate the font size box. You can type
in the exact point size you want or click the drop-down arrow to select a size.
You'll see a preview of the results as you go down the list.
I think 24 looks good.
Maybe we could go a little bigger though. Increase and Decrease are two other
options for quickly changing the size of your text. All you have to do is click the
command and...there we go! To change the actual font, click the drop-down arrow
here then make your way down the list—you'll get that live preview again.
I think I'll go with this one is. It's different but still very easy to read,
which makes it a good choice for a title. So, how about some color? To view your
options, click the arrow next to the font color command you can choose one of the
theme colors here, or, if you don't see anything you like,
go ahead and select More Colors...
This bright pink should look pretty good with the color scheme I have in mind.
Another way to make your text
stand out is to use bold, italic, and underlining. Bold should be a good choice in
this example. Now the text really stands out and it's much easier to read.
I think I'm ready to add some formatting for the rest of the worksheet.
At a glace, it's kind of hard to tell the header row from the rest the chart because it just
isn't very distinct. We can easily fix that by giving the header a unique fill color.
All you have to do is open the menu next the Fill Color command and
make your choice.
Dark gray should be a nice contrast to the pink we used earlier.
Now I just need to change the color of this text to something lighter
You can also use Cell Styles to quickly apply different formatting in your workbook.
Let's give it a try on the rest of our data here. When you're ready select the
Cell styles command and mouse over the styles for a preview, and click the one you want.
At this point you probably noticed adding a fill color to a cell range
causes the line in-between the cells to disappear; I'd like to change that by
adding in some cell borders. Click the drop-down arrow next to the Border
commands, and you'll find a lot of different options. For example you can add a top and
bottom border, a thick outside border, and even different line colors and styles.
For a border that goes all the way outside and in between the cells choose
All borders.
OK, one last thing I'd like to show you is how to change the placement, or alignment,
of your texts using the options in the Alignment group. An addition to left,
center, and right, text can also be aligned to the bottom, middle, or top of the cell.
Aligning the text to the middle center should make this data look really nice
and easy to read.
See a big difference formatting can make? Not only does my
spreadsheet look better than it did before, it's also easier to review the data.