“Formatting Toolbar”

Excel gives you two tools you can use to “Format” your “Worksheets”.

The first is the “Formatting toolbar”:

This contains buttons that allows us to change alignment of the text and numbers in the cells, merge cells and the change the font or the background color of the “Cells”.

To use these buttons, we select the “Cell” or “Range” of “Cells”, and click the appropriate button.

Note that this “Toolbar” is divided into six sections.

1. In the first section, we have “Tools” to “Format” the font and font size.
2. In the second section, we can do the letter formatting: “Bold”, “Italic” and “Underline”
3. The third section contains the buttons for aligning : “Left”, “Right”, “Center and “Merge cell”.
4. The fourth section contains the controls that we use for the layout of our numbers:
   “Currency”, “Percent”, “Comma”(“Scientific notation”), More and Fewer of the decimal places
5. The fifth section, we use to increase or reduce the indent of our text.
6. The last section contains the controls which we can use to give color to the cells and their edges like, “Border style”, “Fill color” and “Text color”.

Some buttons have a black arrow next to them, when we click on this arrow, a submenu will be shown, where we can choose from several specifications.

The “Cell properties” dialog

The second “Tool” for the formatting of our “Cells” is the “Cell properties” dialog.

In this dialog we can specify more “Format” for the “Cell”.
While we have limited options in the “Formatting toolbar”, we have all formatting possibilities at our disposal in this dialog.

In the dialog, we find six tabs to change the “Cell” “Format”.

The sixth tab, “Protection”

(“Protection”)

does not affect the layout of our cells and is therefore only discussed in a later lesson.

The first five tabs are
“Number” (“Number”), “Alignment” (“Alignment”), “Font” (“Font”), “Border” (“Border”) and “Patterns” (“Patterns”)

To take advantage of these “Formats”, we select the “Cell” (s), right click and choose “Format cells” (“Format Cells”) from the popup menu, or we choose “Format” – “Cells” from our menu bar .

Once the dialog appears, we click on the tab for the formatting options that we want to apply, choose the changes that we want to apply and click OK.

Let us take a closer look at different tabs:

The “Number” tab

We use the “Number” tab to format the data in the cells we have selected.

When we view the different categories by selecting them in the left half of the dialog, we see a brief description below, plus a preview at the top.

Once we format our “Cell” with our “Formatting toolbar”, we can “Edit” or “Delete” using this tab .

You first select the “Cell” (s), open the “Cell properties” dialog box, choose “General” and click OK.

The “Alignment” tab.

In this tab we can set the horizontal and vertical alignment, “Shrink to fit”, “Merge cells”, “Wrap text”, and set the “Orientation” of text ( to rotate).

Select the layout you want and click Ok.

In Excel XP and 2003 we can also make the text heading.

In some languages such as Hebrew and Arabic they write from right to left.

Excel gives us the ability to print from right to left, when we check this box.

This is rarely used, but it is new.

Once you merged the “Cells”, if you again wish to disconnect them, first open the “Cell properties” dialog, click the check box “Merge cells” (“Merge Cells“) to divide the cells, and then click OK.

The “Font” tab

In this tab we can determine all “Font” options, even special effects.

We use the “Font” drop-down menu to choose the “Font”.
We use the “Font style” to determine the style, standard, grease, etc. ..
We use the dropdown menu of “Font size” to determine the size of our font.
We can choose a style for “Underline”.
We use the “Color” drop-down menu to identify the color of the “Font”.

And in the section “Effects”, we determine the lines to “Superscript” or “Subscript”.

There is a preview window to view our changes before we apply it to our “Cell” (s).

When the settings meet your requirements, click on OK.

The “Border” tab

In this tab we set the border of our selected cells.

We can choose to set outlines and borders on the four sides of the “Cell”.

We can choose the style and color to our borders.
We click “None” (“None”) if we wish no borders.

Click OK if you are satisfied.

The “Patterns” tab

In this tab, we can fill the “Cell” with color and / or the “Pattern”.

Choose a color for selected cell (s), or choose a pattern from the “Pattern” dropdown menu and click OK.

Please be aware when you choose a “Pattern” for “Cells” that are also storing information, this is very difficult to read.

Actually, you use “Patterns” just for your cells which contain no information.

Remove all “Formatting” in “Cells”

We can remove all format settings of one or more cells by first selecting the “Cell” (s). Then click on “Edit” and select “Clear – Formats” in our menu bar.

“Copy” all “Formatting” of a “Cell” to other “Cells”

We have the ability to “Copy” only the layout of our “Cell” (s).

To do this we first select the cell where we want to “Copy” the “Formatting”.

We click on the “Copy/ Paste” icon in the “Standard Toolbar”.

Then we click and drag on the cell (s) where we want to “Paste” the “Formatting”.

Release the mouse button, and that’s it.

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