Formatting your spreadsheet can make it look nicer and make it easier to use.
You'll be amazed at how adding color, borders, and different shading can really make information
in your spreadsheet easier to read and use. In Excel 2007, formatting your information
as a table is effortless! To format your information as a table, just select any cell that contains
information. Then, in the Styles group on the Home tab,
click the Format as Table command. A list of predefined tables appear.
All you need to do is left-click a table style to select it.
Let's see, this one looks nice. Once you select the table style you want,
a dialog box will appear. Excel has automatically selected the cells
for your table. We can see from the range listed that it has
selected cells A1 to G47. If you need to change that, you can do that
right in this field. It looks like I need to include G48.
If you're table has headings like ours, be sure this box is selected so Excel knows your
table has headings. And click OK.
And now we can see that our table has been formatted with the table style we chose.
By default, the table will be set up with the drop-down arrows in the header so that
we can filter the table, if we'd like to. You can also modify your table once you've
inserted it. As you can see, we're on the Table Tools Design
tab. This tab is visible once we are working in
a table. For example, if I click off the table the
tab disappears. As soon as I select a cell inside the table
the tab is visible and active. From here, you can make some changes to the
way the table appears. You can select a different table style in
the Tables Styles group. Or, in the Table Styles Options group, you
can take away the header row. You can remove banded rows or columns.
I'll leave the banded rows because I think it makes this spreadsheet easier to read.
You can even make the first and last columns bold.
All of these options can be toggled on and off by selecting and deselecting the box.
You have some other options in the Tools and External Data Table groups, but we're not
going to explore those in this video. In the Properties group you can name your
table and you can click Resize Table, to change the cells that make up your table.
As you may have noticed, in Excel there are often many ways you can accomplish the same
task. In addition to using the Format as table command,
you can also select the Insert tab and click the Table command.
From here, the process is the same as what we just went through to insert a table.
Formatting Tables gives spreadsheets a polished and professional look! In Excel 2007 you can
spruce up your spreadsheets quicker than ever before.