You’ve Got Designs on Your Worksheet in Excel 2010 part 1

Ok—your data are in place, your scintillating, envy-stoking formulas are doing what you want them to do, and it’s all over but  the formatting. What do you do next? And how? Obviously, that depends. After all, at the end of the day workbooks aren’t  meant to be things of beauty, at least not for their own sake. They’re instruments of analysis and presentation, and the data you compile need to be as lucid and intelligible as possible—and indeed, should ideally make sense to someone who doesn’t  know terribly much about Excel.

Just the same, you want your workbook to look good—and to enhance your audience’s comprehension of the data, even if that  audience consists exclusively of the person who’s designed the workbook. And in this connection Excel showcases a slew  of ways in which you can engineer that enhancement. And we’re going to explore quite a few of them. Not all, mind you, but a  lot.

Of course, formatting a worksheet calls for a dollop of perspective, too. One mustn’t give in to the it’s-there-so-let’s-use-it  mindset that can entice the user into designing the worksheet equivalent of a polka dot blouse atop a plaid skirt. After all, does  your boss really want to see her sales data in the Chiller font? You know the answer—and you’d probably better know it.

But aesthetic judgments aside, the first—and really integral—thing you need to know about formatting is this: apart from one  obscure exception, formatting data on the worksheet changes the appearance, and not the value, of those data; and while you  may hold that truth to be self-evident, it needs to be kept in mind, because the mind and the eye play tricks (as we’ll see).

Thus if I enter the number 17 in a cell and tint it green, underline it, cast it into a boldface, enlarge it, center it in its cell, and  angle it to a pitch of 48 degrees (and that’s doable), that number remains exactly 17—and it remains a number, and so if I  multiply it by 3 it’ll still yields 51—no matter what it looks like. Formatting won’t “do” anything to a number, other than change  the way it looks.

Coloring a negative number red or coupling it with a currency symbol may tweak the data informatively, but neither tweak will  change the value that number represents. Coif your hair in dreadlocks or a Mohawk; either way, it’s still you.

In the pre-2007 releases of Excel formatting options were assigned to their own, separate heading on the Menu bar, and as  luck would have it, that command was called…Format. It’s noteworthy, however, that that term has been banished from the  Tab and Group names in 2010, although you will find a Format button in the Cells Group on the Home tab; instead, most of the  standard formatting arsenal is now stockpiled in the Home tab groups, however its buttons are named. Indeed, the great  majority of buttons in that tab can properly be called formatting in operation.

And as you proceed you’ll also need to remind yourself that formatting in Excel 2010 avails itself of live previewing, meaning  that when you rest your mouse over a formatting possibility—say, a change in font—the cells you’ve selected for that change  will immediately display the change in preview form—before you actually click to implement the change. Decide against it?  Just pull your mouse back or click elsewhere.

Bear in mind as well as that the many of these formatting buttons perform commands that are also  stored in a kind of catch-all dialog box called Format Cells; and if you think back to Chapter 1 and that Dialog Launcher arrow (Figure 4–1):

you’ll see that the Font, Alignment, and Number groups on the Home tab are all equipped with the arrow. Click any one of these and it‘ll take you to Format Cells, each one emphasizing a different one
of its tabs, e g. (Figure 4–2):

But before we get to these buttons, we need to review what you’ll encounter before you make any active formatting decisions.

—namely, the worksheet defaults. Depending on your operating system, you will see a different default font. Windows XP  brings back Arial 10-point as the default font in Excel 2010, whereas Windows 7 and Vista users will see the same Calibri  11-point font that was introduced in the 2007 version of Office. Points assay font heights, and so 72 points total an inch-high  font.

The Font Button Group: A Closer Look.

So let’s turn more directly to the buttons in the Font Group in the Home tab. If you want to change the operative font in a cell,  a range of cells, or the entire worksheet for that matter, you need to carry out what’s called the select-then-do routine, a  technique that really applies to any formatting change you wish to introduce anywhere. Very simply, select-then-do means  you select those cells in which you want to implement the change, and then make the change.

Thus to change the font to, say, Chiller:

• Select the cells you want to change.

• If necessary, click on the Home tab, and then click on the down arrow alongside.

the Font box in the Font group (Figure 4–3):

• Click on the font you wish—in this case Chiller.

Note that the cells you’ve selected need not be currently populated with data. They can be blank, and so we see that formatting changes can be instituted prospectively or retroactively. You can format first, and enter data later—or vice versa.

Note in addition that after you complete your change the cells you’ve selected remain selected— because Excel wants you to  be able to ascribe additional changes to the cell if you wish. Thus if I want to immediately follow the font change with a change  in font size, I just click the down arrow alongside the Font Box, and click a size selection (Figure 4–4):