Chapter 7. Present Worksheets

With Excel, you can adjust almost every aspect of how your worksheets appear. Such control results in more than making text bold or coloring cells blue. Formatting makes your worksheets easier to read and understand and thus more useful to others.

This chapter provides tips on formatting. You learn how to format numbers and cells manually and then how to apply formats quickly with Format Painter. Format Painter speeds your work. With Format Painter, in just a few clicks, you can copy a format from one cell to other cells.

Excel gives you several tools to simplify the work of formatting. The Home tab and the Format Cells dialog box provide all the controls you need to change the look and properties of both cells and numbers. You can adjust the color, border, and numerous other cell properties, and you can choose from a variety of formats for numbers, dates, and times.

With shapes, text boxes, and pictures, Excel goes even further, giving you the ability to integrate graphics into your worksheet. It also supplies prepackaged styles you can apply to your graphics to give them a distinctive flair.

You can place background images behind your data to get people’s attention or to enhance the content itself. You can also take a picture of your worksheet and use the resulting graphic in Excel or another software product.

Get Excel® 2007: Top 100 Simplified® Tips & Tricks now with the O’Reilly learning platform.

O’Reilly members experience books, live events, courses curated by job role, and more from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers.