the format painter offers an easy way to
copy formatting from one part of your
spreadsheet to another this is one way
to ensure that things stay consistent
without spending a lot of time trying to
replicate your formatting manually in
this example our dates have very
inconsistent formatting in addition to
the fonts and alignment being
inconsistent they also use a variety of
different date formats some use along
date others use a short date without the
year and so on I want all of these to
match the formatting of the first date
to do this just click the format painter
command on the Home tab and it will copy
all of the formatting from the selected
cell then we'll click and drag over the
other dates
and now all of them are perfectly
consistent now you can also double-click
the format painter which will lock it on
until you turn it off for example if we
click this pink cell then double click
the format painter we can click on as
many cells as we want and the format
painter will stay on this is an easy way
to highlight several non adjacent cells
we're clicking and dragging isn't an
option when you use the double clicking
method you'll need to make sure to click
the format painter again when you're
done to turn it off so there are really
two ways to use the format painter
single clicking and double clicking and
you can just use whichever one is more
convenient depending on the situation
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