Formatting Text

Sean now wants to call attention to Excel cells/rows/columns, and spruce up the appearance of the document using the formatting features available in Excel. These features will let you change font size, type, and style, as well as alter text alignment and add shading, colors, and patterns to your spreadsheet.

To format the text in your worksheet,

1. Click and select cell B1.

2. Click on the Bold button on the formatting toolbar.

The text in the selected cell becomes bold

3. Keeping this cell selected, use the Font-size drop-down list box to change the font size to 16 point.

The text becomes bigger, so much so that it overflows into the adjacent cells.

4. Click on the Font color drop-down list box, and select the color LIGHT BLUE. ( Note that as you place the mouse pointer over a color in the palette, its name appears in a box.)

After executing steps 2, 3, and 4, the text formatting changes to reflect your selections.

5. Place the cursor in cell B2. Keeping the mouse button pressed, drag down to continue selecting adjacent cells. As you reach cell B20, release the mouse button.

The column of cells from B2 to B20 gets selected.

6. Click on the Bold button on the formatting toolbar to make the selection bold.

You can see that the text in all the selected cells has been made bold.

7. You may have to adjust the column widths at this point.

8. Save your work.

TIP: Instead of clicking on the various buttons on the formatting toolbar, you can also use the Cells caption in the format menu to make necessary changes to the fonts, font styles and sizes, shading etc.