Fonts, Font Sizes, and Attributes

Once you have developed your spreadsheet, you may wish to enhance it for presentation purposes. Excel has an entire toolbar dedicated to the formatting of cells and the data in them. The FORMATTING TOOLBAR has some of the more popular formatting tools needed for enhancing a spreadsheet.

The buttons on the toolbar are, in order from left to right:

1. FONT: allows you to change the typeface of the data in the cell
2. FONT SIZE: controls the size of the font in cells
3. BOLD, ITALIC, & UNDERLINE: makes selected cells bold, italic, or underlined.
4. CELL ALIGNMENT BUTTONS (LEFT, CENTER, & RIGHT): displays data in a cell to the left side, center, or right side of the cell
5. CENTER ACROSS COLUMNS: when several cells in a single row are selected, centers data in the first cell across all selected cells
6. NUMBER FORMATS (CURRENCY, PERCENTAGE, & COMMA): changes the formatting of numbers to show currency, percentage, or inserts commas for each thousands set
7. INCREASE DECIMAL & DECREASE DECIMAL: increases or reduces the number of decimal places displayed by one
8. INCREASE INDENT & DECREASE INDENT: increases or decreases the indent
9. BORDERS: a selection of borders that can be placed around cells*
10. FILL COLOR: a selection of colors to fill the background of selected cells*
11. TEXT COLOR: a selection of colors for text and values in selected cells*

*Each of these buttons comes with a drop-down arrow if you wish to choose an item besides the option listed on the button

Take a look at the following samples on this spreadsheet: (click on the thumbnail image to see the full picture)

You can also use the Format Painter button to copy formats.

More Information about Formatting

Besides the Formatting toolbar, users can go to the Format menu to make similar changes to those above. Also, it is possible to turn off the gridlines on the spreadsheet that distinguish the cells by going to the Tools|Options menu and clicking on the View tab at the top of the dialog box.

Care should be taken when choosing fonts, formats, and colors in a spreadsheet, especially in charts. Although colors can be shown on the screen, most individuals only have access to black-and-white printers. Colors will print out in different shades of gray or patterns on a printer, depending on the colors chosen and the type of printer. However, certain colors, such as lime green, sky blue, yellow, and magenta (hot pink), will show up as even shades of gray when printed on a black-and-white printer.