Formatting

Formatting Excel 2000 A Sample Application Tutorial First in a series of five tutorials that give an overview of all of Excel's major features. excel spreadsheet tutorial4/25/2002draft C:\Documents and Settings\jorr.NYCIRCUITS\My Documents\SbooksExcel\Excel 2000\A Sample Application\Tutorials\M1 Formatting\ This is the first in a series of tutorials that will cover Excel in depth.

This is also then first Screenbook in a five book set that walks through some of Excel's most interesting features.

It is customary to start out with the simplest functions and work up to more difficult ones, but let's try starting by walking through a project that shows just how powerful Excel can be.

You can download the spreadsheet here and follow along, if you like. Or, view the slides now, and try it yourself later.

First, let's format the tables so that it is clear which data is in which table.

]]> Select column G. Joe Orr [Empty] Copyright 2000 All Rights Reserved orrj@jserv.com Now, right-click on the selected area to show the pop-up menu for cells. (The grid with all of the data is called a worksheet. A cell is one of the squares in the grid.)

]]> Clicking on Format Cells opens the Format Cells dialog. Joe Orr [Empty] Copyright 2000 All Rights Reserved orrj@jserv.com Column F is the end of one table, and Column G is the start of the next, so let's put a thick line between the two. Click on the Border tab.

]]> The Format Cells dialog. Joe Orr [Empty] Copyright 2000 All Rights Reserved orrj@jserv.com We want to use a thick line when making the border, so first click on the thick line in the Line Style box. A dotted line will show around the thick line to indicate that it is selected.

]]> Choose a line thickness. Joe Orr [Empty] Copyright 2000 All Rights Reserved orrj@jserv.com Now click on the left line in the Border box. This causes a thick black line to appear. This will be the left border on the selected area. (We selected all of column G, remember?)

]]> De-select the column. Joe Orr [Empty] Copyright 2000 All Rights Reserved orrj@jserv.com OK, things are starting to clear up a bit. We can see that we have a table of data in columns A - F, and some other information in columns G-I. Lets make the tables easier to see by formatting the column headers (the titles of the columns).

First, let's do the table in columns A-F. Select the column headers by first clicking on column A1 and then dragging the mouse over to column F1. The cells become highlighted to show that they are selected.

]]> Right-click on the selected area. Joe Orr [Empty] Copyright 2000 All Rights Reserved orrj@jserv.com Clicking on Format Cells shows the Format Cells dialog. We'll be changing the background color of the column headers, which we can do from the Patterns dialog.

]]> Clicking on Format Cells shows the Format Cells dialog. Joe Orr [Empty] Copyright 2000 All Rights Reserved orrj@jserv.com Here is the Pattern dialog. We have just selected a new background color for the selected cells in the worksheet.

]]> Changing the font color via the Font dialog. Joe Orr [Empty] Copyright 2000 All Rights Reserved orrj@jserv.com This is the Font dialog. Clicking on the Color select item displays a menu of colors.