Welcome to Excelling with Excel

More Basics

Formatting
When you complete this page and the assignment, you are ready to move on to linking Excel and Word

Excel is an interesting program. Not only do you have to be sure that your formulas are correct and that you have all the data needed in the spreadsheet, you have to format the spreadsheet so that it is easy to read. You have to format a spreadsheet so that it can be understand by others who may not be familiar with Excel but need the data to make sound decisions.

TIPS:

• use color sparingly
• do not use red unless you have negative numbers
• change font size for titles and column labels
• use the B (bold) formatting for titles and labels
• put a double line under the final total in your spreadsheet
• label your sheets (XP lets you change the color of the labels - cool!)
• check your spreadsheet by printing it out, does it look good?
• answer this question: should you print with gridlines showing or column and row headings showing?

Things you can do:

merge and center

borders

highlights

inserting rows and columns

Now do the formatting assignments.

One thing you can do is merge and center the title. What this means is that you can have the title centered only over the data in your spreadsheet, or even parts of the data.

• decide on the area you want to have Excel look at to merge and center the information
• if I have data between cells A1 and G1, I would select cells A1:G1
• then I would select the merge and center icon (the one with the letter A and arrows)
• Voila - done!

Diagram:

Using borders

Excel users use borders to help readers read and understand data. To work with borders, use the border icon in the toolbar.

Diagram

Highlighting cells

You can highlight cells by:

• select the cell
• click on the paint icon arrowhead
• select a color and you are done!

And to give color to text:

• select the text
• click on the text color icon (colored letter A) arrowhead
• select a color and you are done!

AND, you can even do a title in WordArt

• to find WordArt, be sure your drawing tools are out
• where to find these tools: View-Toolbars-Drawing or select the draw icon (it has color, has the letter A and a cylinder
• just follow the directions - this is too, too easy!

Diagram:

Inserting rows and columns

Sometimes you look at a spreadsheet and see that you should insert a row or column to make for readability. AND, more importantly, sometimes you see that you need to insert a row or column to help others understand the spreadsheet.

This is just 2, 2, EZ!

to insert a row

• select the row number
• INSERT Menu-Rows
• Excel automatically inserts a row ABOVE the row selected
• this tells you, to think where you want the row to go

to insert a column

• select a column letter
• INSERT Menu-Columns
• Excel automatically inserts a column to the LEFT of the column selected
• this, again tells you, think where you want that column to go

Diagram

Now do the formatting assignments.

I know when I finish the formatting assignments, I can move forward to learning how to link information between Excel and Word