Formatting Cells

Tips, Tricks, and Answers

The following articles are available for the 'Formatting Cells' topic. Click the article's title (shown in bold) to see the associated article.

Applying Diagonal Borders to Cells
Borders on all sides of a cell are easy to do in Excel. You can also create diagonal borders that run right through the middle of the cell.

Changing Cell Border Color
If you add a border around one or more cells, that border is normally black. If you want, you can pick different border colors by using the approach outlined in this tip.

Converting Numeric Values to Text Values
If you have a range of numeric values in your worksheet, you may want to change them from numbers to text values. Here's how you can make the switch.

Cycling Through Font Colors
If you need to easily change the font colors in a group of cells, one of the esoteric commands Excel provides is the Cycle Font Colors tool. This tip explains how to make the command available and use it for your formatting.

Displaying Hundredths of Seconds
When you display a time in a cell, Excel normally displays just the hours, minutes, and seconds. If you want to display the time with more precision, you'll need to create a custom format, as described in this tip.

Drawing Borders
Adding borders around cells is a common formatting task. You can make the task more intuitive by actually drawing the borders using the mouse.

Finding Cells Filled with a Particular Color
Do you need to find cells that are formatted with a specific color? The Find and Replace features of Excel make it easy.

Formatting Cells with Patterns
You can shade your cells by filling them with a pattern. Here's how to select the pattern you want used.

Getting Expected Formatting when Concatenating
Use a formula to concatenate the values in to cells, and you might not get exactly what you expect. This most often has to do with the way that Excel displays numbers and how it maintains them internally. This tip examines some ways around any potential problems.

Hiding the Contents of Cells
Hiding information in one or more cells can be a challenge. This tip presents several different techniques that can help you keep information from being displayed.

Indenting Information in a Cell
One of the formatting options available for your cell data is to indent the cell contents from either the left or right edges of the cell. Excel makes indenting easy, using the Format Cells dialog box.

Making Cells Flash
Want to draw attention to some information in a particular cell? Make the cell flash, on and off. Here's how you can implement this type of effect.

Negative Elapsed Times
Excel allows you to perform math using times as operands. If you subtract a later time from an earlier time, you should end up with a negative time. If you don't see the negative time, it could be because of the way you have Excel configured.

Removing Cell Formatting
Getting rid of formatting from a cell or group of cells can be done using several different techniques. This tip describes the techniques available to you.

Repeating Cell Contents
If you want, you can format a cell so that its contents are repeated over and over again for whatever the width of the cell is. There are a couple of ways you can do this.

Repeating the Contents of a Cell
One way you can format a cell is so that its contents are repeated over and over again for the entire width of the cell. It's simple to do using the formatting technique highlighted in this tip.

Row Height and Wrapped Text
If you wrap the text in a cell so that it spans multiple lines, Excel can automatically adjust the height of a row to accommodate the multiple lines. If it doesn't adjust, then the information in this tip will be useful to you.

Setting Cell Orientation
Excel isn't limited to displaying text horizontally in a workbook. Instead, it allows you to adjust the orientation of the text to exactly what you want to see.

 

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