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The following are additional topics related to the subject 'Formatting Cells.' A bracketed number after the topic indicates how many articles are related to that subject.

Tips, Tricks, and Answers

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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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Repeating the Contents of a Cell. 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.

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.