Applying Styles

Ms Excel provides built-in styles which you can quickly use to style different kinds of data. Styles are usually made up of: Number, Alignment, Font, Border, Fill and Protection.
Kindly follow the steps below, to apply styles to your excel worksheet data.

• APPLYING STYLES
• Step 1 - First, you need a random set of data for this illustration. You can copy the one I used in the image below to follow up with this tutorial or you can create your own data and use it too.

• Step 2 - In the Home tab, go to the Styles group and click on the Cell Styles option. A dropdown list of cells styles will be displayed organized into the following categories: (A) Good, Bad and Neutral (B) Data and Model (C) Titles and Headings (D) Themed Cell Styles (E) Number Format. The last two options are the New Cell Style and Merge Styles.

• Step 3 - Now once you place your mouse pointer on any of the style it will be applied to the selected text. In my own case, I have selected the Types of Laptop and in the styles under the category Themed Cell Styles I placed my mouse pointer on the Ancient2 option.

NOTE:

You can choose a different style that suits you. You can also select more than one cell to apply the styles.

• CREATING NEW CELL STYLES

Apart from the built-in styles that comes with Excel, you can also create your own custom styling which you can store and easily apply to any data as you want.

• Step 1 - In the Home tab, go to the Styles group and click on the Cell Styles option. A dropdown list of cells styles will be displayed. Click on the New Style option.

• Step 2 - The style dialog box will display. Inside this box, you can edit the name of your new style, then after that click on the Format button.

• Step 3 - The format cells dialog box will be displayed. Here you can click on different format tabs (Number, Alignment, Font, Border Fill and Protection) and set the formatting that you want in them. After you are done, click on the Ok button.

• Step 4 - You will be taken back to the previous dialog box. Notice that the default style for formatting will be changed to the current one. Then click the Ok button to create this new custom cell style.

• Step 5 - Now your new cell style has been saved successfully and added to the custom styles. To see and use your new cell style, in the Home tab, go to the Styles group again and click on the Cell Styles. From the dropdown options the custom styles will be at the top as shown in the image below.

• Step 6 - Now enter any data on your worksheet and select it. Then place you mouse pointer on the new cell style under the custom styles. The style will be applied to the data just like other built-in cell styles.

• EDITING NEW CELL STYLES
• Step 1 - In the Home tab, go to the Styles group and click on the Cell Styles option. A dropdown list of cells styles will be displayed. Click on the New Style option.
  From the dropdown list of option, under the custom styles, Right Click the custom style you created and this will display list of options to select from. Click the Modify option.

• Step 2 - This will now open the style dialog where you can now edit the styles name in the input at the top, and also edit the formatting by clicking on the Format button which take you to the Format Cells dialog box.

NOTE:

To edit built-in cell styles, you can also follow similar method above. Also, after right clicking on the cell style, there are other options which you can use to delete, apply and duplicate cell styles.
Option to delete built-in cell styles is disabled in Excel.

• MERGING CELL STYLES

The option works when there are two workbooks opened and you want to copy the styles of one workbook onto the other.
Here I have Book1 and Book2 opened. My Book1 contains the custom style we recently added with the steps above. Now let's go to Book2 and copy the custom style from Book1.

• Step 1 - In the Book2, in the Home tab go to the Styles group and click on the Cell Styles option. A dropdown list of cells styles will be displayed. From the dropdown list of option click the Merge Styles option.

• Step 2 - A dialog box will be displayed, inside the dialog box, select the Book1 that you want to copy style from. Then click the Ok button and the style will be successfully copied to that Book2

• Step 3 - To confirm that the style has actually been copied, follow the process of going to the Styles group inside the Home tab, then click on the Cell Styles. From the dropdown list of options, the copied styles will be seen there at the top. (In our own case we just have only one custom style that we copied and so there is it showing there as in the image below)

TIP:

Try not to just jump into the next tutorial because you have finished this one, all tutorials here give you the opportunity and strong background to try our other similar thing by yourself, so try creating another custom cell styles and use it on real works you may have or create yours from scratch.