Now the next operation that I want to perform here has a similar concept, think of formatting when you format something. There is a number of options that you can perform, I could change the font the color of the font the background and borders the font size, Italicize it a number of features that you can perform to make something more presentable.
Now let us say that you want to create consistency through-out your document in formatting, my headers they should always be blue and background white text in bold and have not a border at the bottom and I want to use that everywhere.
Well, I could use the format painter or I can do it manually but that is still a lot of work especially for really large documents, and then what if you format a document you make all your headers beautiful, they are big in bold and blue and white text and so on. You handed out to your co-workers and there just this is great. But you know with that blue it just does not go with the rest of our documents it is not our style, I want it to match the green that is in my logo, It should be green backgrounds not blue.
And you think well now you get to go back through this document. I got an update everywhere that we have to make it green. What is a task?
Well styles are saved formatting, formatting that you create you save off and then you can reuse apply anywhere you need within a worksheet or instead of any worksheet in the workbook created once and just reuse it.
Now on top of that you can modify a style, and this will update every cell that uses that style.
This is how you work with styles instead of Excel. And once again much like the format painter, this is exclusive to excel I use styles inside Microsoft Word all the time, super saver on time. and it also works with various features like table of contents inside a word. There are the styles inside of Excel.
So first you know what I am going to create a style that will change my headers, my headers are already formatted though so to clear this up I am going to go ahead and highlight my headers (B5 to G5 columns), and I am going to clear the format and I am going to get back to square one once again just black text so on Home tab, I got my editing section in there I get clear I am going to go to clear and I made it clear the formats.
This is a really effective really quick way to just wipe the formatting out of whatever you have highlighted, You can clear the formatting like that in one button press. Now that actually go up my dates, You see that their memory dates are just numbers. So, I am going to quickly fix those.
And you might recall way back when we were talking about dates, I am going to go up to number change it, I am going to go down to more number formats, and I select custom format. And I mean if find one of those date formats and then see there it is right there. And I got my date formatting back in there.
So, I got some row headers. they are just black text. Now, I am going to format one of these.
I change the background again I like blue is still lighter blue. I am going to put a bottom border on it.
And that is something that I want to be able to reuse on all my headers here. So once again, I could use the format painter I could do it manually. But let us take-a-look at creating the style, so I can save that formatting and reuse it.
So I am going to go back and select Cell B5, this is the cell that has the formatted that I want to convert into a style, so it selected I will go Home tab towards the far right You have got a section called styles, and there you got cell styles.
You have got a-number-of different styles that Microsoft has given to you just out of the box. These are predefined formatting that you can use inside your document. But what I like to do here, I create my own Cell Style, so I am going to go to a New Cell Style that is opposite my style dialog box.
And I am going to give it a name. I set name is AwesomeHeaderStyle, super awesome. I gave it a name and that is all then I am going to hit OK. I have now created a style that I can use.
Now, I highlight MIN, MAX, AVERAGE, COUNT, I am going to go back up to Cell Style, at the top I have got my style AwesomeHeaderStyle.
So, they are all consistent. Imagine you know make this a much larger document, I would use a style all over the place. Blue background white text borders bold looking good. Now rather than me manually going through and performing this task and updating it all I need to do now is update the style.
Back to Cell Styles, I found my AwesomeHeaderStyle, I am going to right click on it.
I am going to modify the style, now inside the modify window. I am going to go to format.. This is going to open-up Format Cells window.
And I am all going to the only thing I am going to change here Font, Background color, Border.. then click OK, OK.
And I have now updated format my document.
I modify up to the style which in turn updated everywhere that style is used in my document.
Updatable formatting, You make one change. You have now updated everywhere, you have used that style.
Now once again this is not exclusive to Excel. In fact, for me personally, I do not use them a lot instead of Excel although they are very neat features, but Microsoft-Word I use them all the time in there. Think of a 40-page document that you have got to go through and format. Somebody decides you know what I do not like that blue is go green, You update the one style you just up all 40 pages within your document.
Try it out, build a style format something, Select it, create a new style, give it a name applied to other cells of the style and watch the magic happen.