Formatting Cells

Modules >>
Excel I >>
Formatting cells

To create the spreadsheet shown in the previous section, you will need to format some cells. The following formatting options are described below:

Entering Text

In the Word module, you learned how to use toolbars. For this lesson, you will need to view the "Formatting" toolbar. Much of the formatting features you learned for Word are available in Excel to format font within cells. Excel provides some advanced options, however. To access these, go to the "Format" menu and select "Cells..." then click on the "Alignment" tab to get the following window:

To enter text in a cell, click on the cell then type. You will see the text displayed in the formula bar at the top of the spreadsheet, which looks like the following:

A5 denotes the cell in which text is being entered and the text will appear in the right half of the formula bar. This field will be used later to enter formulas to calculate numbers. You may notice that each time you press enter, the cursor will move down to the next cell. To enter a "hard carriage return," which is equivalent to pressing enter within a cell to move down one line, press the "ALT" key + the "ENTER" key. To display multiple lines in a cell, you would need to select the "Wrap text" check box on the Alignment tab shown in the Format Cell window above.

Formatting font styles and sizes will not be covered in this module. Excel uses many of the same format font features that Word uses, and this material was covered in the Word module. To format font, click on the "Font" tab in the Format Cell window shown above. The Formatting toolbar also contains shortcuts for formatting fonts.

Alignment

To align the text in cells, you would click on the alignment options (left, right, centre) in the formatting toolbar. More advanced alignment options are available in the above Format Cells window. Under the "text alignment" section, you can adjust both the horizontal and vertical alignment of the text in each cell. To apply formatting to a range of cells, select the range by clicking and dragging your pointer across them. For horizontal text alignment, the default selection is "General," but this can be changed to left, centre, right, fill, justify, and centre across selection. The "fill" option will repeat the text in a cell until it completely fills the cells space. "Centre across selection" is used to centre text across cells or merged cells.

In the "orientation" of the Format Cells window, you can enter the number of degrees or click the window to move the text to the angle you prefer. This can sometimes be helpful when assignment titles are too long to fit within the width of a column. The "shrink to fit" option will reduce the text size to fit within a column width if necessary.

Merging cells

On the sample spreadsheet displayed in the previous section (herein referred to as the sample spreadsheet), the titles were centred at the top of the sheet in what appeared to be one cell that stretched across the columns. For your assignment, your title will also need to span across columns. To do this, you will need to merge cells. Select the cells that you would like to merge, then select the "merge cells" checkbox in the Format Cells window shown above, then click OK. A shortcut for merging cells appears in the formatting toolbar. You can merge selected cells by simply clicking on the following button:

Row height and column width

To change the row height, drag the boundary below the row heading until the row is the height you want, as shown in the following image:

To make the row height fit the contents, double-click the boundary below the row heading. The same approach can be used to change the width of columns.

Number format

On the sample spreadsheet, you will notice that some numbers are displayed only as a whole number (i.e., "8"), whereas others contain a decimal with one digit shown to the right. These cells were formatted to select a given number format. To format a number, go to the Format Cells window and select the "Number" tab to view the following features:

A number of categories are available for pre-formatted number formats. To increase or decrease the number of decimal places, change the number displayed in the field shown above. To enter dates, you can select the "Date" category and choose a date format you wish to use. You can then enter only "3-8" in a cell and Excel will display "August 3, 2001." By selecting the "Custom" category, you can enter a number format of your own.

Some shortcuts are available in the formatting toolbar. The following buttons are available for number formatting:

In order from left to right, these buttons are used to format numbers for currency style, percent style, comma style, increase decimal, and decrease decimal. For the assignment, you will need to keep each column consistent in the number of digits displayed to the right of the decimal space. How many digits you display is up to you.

Cell borders

Cell borders can be applied by going to the "Border" tab on the Format Cells window. "Preset" borders (none, outside borders, inside borders) can be chosen or a border can be selected from the "Border" section of the screen. In the "Line" section of the screen, the line style and line colour can be selected. For your assignment, you will need to apply both inside and outside borders to your spreadsheet. The line style and colour can be set to your preference.

Cell colours and patterns

In the sample spreadsheet, yellow shading was applied to one of the titles. For your assignment, you will need to apply either a colour or a pattern to some of the cells in your spreadsheet. To do this, go to the "Pattern" tab in the Format Cells window. On this screen, you can select a colour alone or also apply a pattern. The colour can be chosen by clicking on a coloured square. The pattern can only be applied once a colour is chosen. To select a pattern, click the drop-down menu to view the options.

Please continue to the next section on Simple Functions.