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Microsoft Office 2000

Lesson 4: Excel 2000 (Part 2)

Formatting Style and Content

Give your spreadsheets a more professional appearance with these formatting tips.

Formatting text and individual characters
To make text stand out, you can format all of the text in a cell or only selected characters.

To format text:

Select the characters you want to format
Click a button on the Formatting toolbar

Adding borders, colors, and patterns
To distinguish between different types of information in a worksheet, you can apply borders to cells, shade cells with a background color, or shade cells with a color pattern.

To apply borders to cells:

Select the cells to which you want to add borders
Click Borders on the Formatting toolbar

To apply a different border style:

Click the arrow next to Borders
Click a border on the palette

To shade cells with solid colors:

Select the cells you want to shade
Click the arrow next to Fill Color and then click a color on the palette

To shade cells with patterns:

Select the cells you want to shade
Click on Format – Cells – Patterns
To include a background color with the pattern, click a color in the Cell shading box
Click the arrow next to the Pattern box, and then click the pattern style and color you want
If you do not select a pattern color, the pattern is black

See example of selecting a Pattern

Number Formats
The General number format
The General format is the default number format. In most instances, whatever you enter in a cell that is formatted with the General format is what is displayed.

Built-in number formats
Excel contains many built-in number formats, including accounting, date, time, fraction, scientific and text, from which you can choose.

See example of selecting a Number Format

To see a complete list of these formats:

Click on Format – Cells - Number

The Special category includes formats for postal codes and phone numbers. Options for each category appear to the right of the Category list.

For additional information on formatting Excel spreadsheets see Formatting the Sheet in Microsoft Office 2000 for Windows: Visual QuickStart Guide pp. 145-154.