Master Excel Font Formatting In Just 2 Minutes
Contents
Font formatting makes your Excel Spreadsheet stand out.
This is often an underappreciated part of making spreadsheets.
But visual design is key to engaging people!
Changing The Excel Font
When you want to format text in Excel, you can see a live preview of what they will look like before changing the font.
First things first, make sure you are in the home tab.
Select the cell with the text you want to format, click on the font button within the font group, and the pick list will appear.
You can also see the different font style selection in this menu.
Just scroll over them, and your selection will change to that font style without doing anything else.
When you select a font you want, click on the font name, and your choice will be applied.
This will also work for changing the font colour and cell fill colour.
If you want to see more options for font changing, you can click the dialog box launcher highlighted here.
This dialog box is full of different types of font style formatting options to use.
Font formatting is particularly useful when creating charts, as they help your visualisations stay clear and approachable.
Increase and Decrease Font Size In Excel
If you know the size of the font you want, you can select it from the font size box in the home tab.
Next to the drop-down font size box, there are two letter A’s.
These buttons will decrease and increase font size with one click.
This is a quick way to change the font size.
Just select the cell and then either choose the font size from the drop-down list in the home tab, or click on the relevant ‘A’ button until you reach the desired size.
This skill may seem simple, but it is extremely important for hooking people in to your work.
We always cover it on our Microsoft Excel courses, as being able to present your data is just as important as analysing it!
Bold, Italics, Underlining and Colour In Excel
The picture above shows the font group within the Home tab and highlights where you can do certain things:
- Make text bold
- Italicise text
- Underline
- Fill cell colour / change background colour
- Change the font colour
When you want to format text in a way other than font – this section will prove invaluable.
Bold makes your text stand out – great for bringing attention to a specific data point.
Italics slant your text – this is often used to show things like official names.
Underlining makes you take notice – the best use for underlining is when creating titles for your data or charts.
These three formatting options are particularly useful for distinguishing text within a drop down list.
As for Cell and Font Colour, these are further tools to change the format of your text.
Ideas for Colour changes are to put losses in revenue in red, and gains in green.
Small edits like this, combined with font size, can make a huge difference into the readability of your sheet!
You can also use this alignment group (found next to the font group in the home tab) to change the text alignment.
A great place to use text formatting is in a flowchart, as they are text heavy visualisation.
Format Painter In Excel
This is the tool I probably use most out of the Office suite, as it’s the same in all the programs.
Once you have formatted a cell exactly how you want it, you can copy all the formatting and add it to a different cell.
Click on the cell and then right-click, and click the box with the little paintbrush symbol.
Your cursor will turn into a little cross with a paintbrush next to it.
When you click onto a cell, the formats will be added to that cell.
This is a great tool for making heat maps, which rely on formatting to highlight data.
