Colours, Fonts, Borders and the Format Painter

Good formatting makes a sheet readable at a glance. On the Home tab you can set the font and size, bold and italics, fill colour behind a cell, text colour, borders, and alignment.

Habits that help:

• Make the header row bold with a fill colour.
• Use colour to mean something, and the same meaning everywhere.
• Right-align numbers so digits line up; left-align text.
• Turn off or soften gridlines in View and use borders only where they help.

The Format Painter (the paintbrush on the Home tab) copies the format of one cell onto others: click the source cell, click the brush, then click or drag over the target cells. Double-click the brush to paint several places.

Because formatting never changes values, you can restyle freely without breaking a formula. This example keeps data, calculation and a text label separate.

In Excel most of these controls are on the Home tab. The Format Painter is the paintbrush in the Clipboard group on the left.