The look and feel of your workbook has a
lot to do with the formatting choices you make. For example, let's add some
formatting to this fitness chart. That will make it easier to read and more
visually appealing. We'll start by selecting the cell that contains "Fitness
progress chart" and making the text bigger. In the Font group on the Home tab,
locate the font size box. You can type in the exact point size you want or
click the drop-down arrow to select a size. You'll see a preview of the results as
you go down the list. I think 24 looks good. Maybe we could go a little bigger though.
Increase and Decrease are two other options for quickly changing the size of
your text. All you have to do is click the command and...there we go! To change the
actual font, click the drop-down arrow here then make your way down the list—you'll get that live preview again. I think I'll go with this one is. It's
different but still very easy to read, which makes it a good choice for a title.
So, how about some color? To view your options, click the arrow next to the font
color command you can choose one of the theme colors here, or, if you don't see
anything you like, go ahead and select More Colors... This bright pink should look pretty good with the
color scheme I have in mind. Another way to make your text stand out is to use bold, italic, and
underlining. Bold should be a good choice in this example. Now the text really
stands out and it's much easier to read. I think I'm ready to add some formatting
for the rest of the worksheet. At a glace, it's kind of hard to tell the header row from the rest the chart because it just isn't very distinct. We can easily fix
that by giving the header a unique fill color. All you have to do is open the
menu next the Fill Color command and make your choice. Dark gray should be a nice contrast to
the pink we used earlier. Now I just need to change the color of this text to
something lighter You can also use Cell Styles to quickly
apply different formatting in your workbook. Let's give it a try on the rest
of our data here. When you're ready select the Cell styles command and mouse over the
styles for a preview, and click the one you want. At this point you probably noticed
adding a fill color to a cell range causes the line in-between the cells to
disappear; I'd like to change that by adding in some cell borders. Click the
drop-down arrow next to the Border commands, and you'll find a lot of different options. For example you can add a top and bottom border, a thick outside border,
and even different line colors and styles. For a border that goes all the way
outside and in between the cells choose All borders. OK, one last thing I'd like to show you is
how to change the placement, or alignment, of your texts using the options in the
Alignment group. An addition to left, center, and right, text can also be
aligned to the bottom, middle, or top of the cell. Aligning the text to the middle center
should make this data look really nice and easy to read. See a big difference formatting can make? Not only does my spreadsheet look better than it did
before, it's also easier to review the data.