Microsot Excel contains a very wide variety of formats that you can apply to your cells. Naturally, when you create your worksheets you want your formatting to be consistent. Although this consistency can be achieved by vigilantly applying the same formats to cells containing the same type of information, cell Styles offer much way of achieving consistency in formatting your data.

Cell Styles are located in the Style section of the Home Tab of the Excel Ribbon. When you click on the Cell Styles button the categorised Cell Styles gallery is revealed. The gallery offers a live preview; hovering over any of the styles changes the current selection within your worksheets, giving you a preview of what your data will look like if you choose that particular style.

The first benefit of using styles is that you apply several formats in one operation. For example, say we choose the style called “Heading One”; we automatically change the size, alignment and colour of our text. We can speed up the formatting process even further by using the Format Painter to copy styles into the other cells or even other worksheets. Simply highlight an area that already has a cell style applied, double-click on the Format Painter to make sure it stays highlighted then drag across the appropriate range(s) of cells. When you have finished, click once on the Format Painter to deactivate it.

Having applied cell styles in various parts of a workbook, you can take advantage of the most important benefit offered by styles; if we modify the attributes associated with any of the styles used in a workbook, the formatting of all cells to which those styles have been applied will automatically be updated.

When modifying a style definition, since we’re not directly applying formats to any of the cells, it doesn’t matter which cells are highlighted. To modify the attributes of a style, click on the Cell Styles button, right click on the name of the style and then choose “Modify”. You will then be presented with the six categories of formats which can be included in a style: Number, Alignment, Font, Border, Fill and Protection. The list is fairly comprehensive; it includes just about everything that Excel has to offer in the way of formatting.

You will notice that you have the facility is activated not deactivating categories as necessary. Any categories that do not apply to a particular style can simply remain deactivated (i.e., checkbox not ticked). Simply click on each relevant category and make your selections. When you click OK to confirm these changes, all cells to which the style has been applied will be automatically updated.

The author is a trainer and developer with Macresource Computer Training, an independent computer training company offering Excel 2007 training in London and throughout the UK.

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