Formatting Cells and Ranges

In Excel, you can format cells in a wide variety of ways—everything from choosing how to display the borders and background to controlling how Excel represents the text you enter in the cell. This section shows you how the most useful kinds of formatting work and how to apply them.

Each cell comes with basic formatting applied to it—the font and font size to use and usually the General number format, which you'll meet shortly. So when you create a new workbook and start entering data in it, Excel displays the data in a normal-size font.

TIP: To control the font and font size Excel uses for new workbooks, choose Excel Preferences or press Cmd+, (Cmd and the comma key). Click the General icon in the Authoring area ...

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