How Styles Work In Microsoft Excel 2007

In addition to using and modifying Excel’s built-in cell styles, you also have the facility of creating your own. A convenient method of doing this is to highlight a range of cells and apply all the formatting attributes that you would like your style to have and then to turn those attributes into a cell style. When you create your cell style, Excel will detect all the attributes from the highlighted cells and include them in the style. Let’s take an simple example; let’s say we want to create a cell style for headings with our text angled at 45 degrees.

To set the text angle to 45 degrees, choose “Angle Counter Clockwise” from the Alignment section of the Home Tab of the Excel Ribbon. We might also want to centre the text horizontally and vertically, change the colour and make the text bold and slightly larger. Having chosen the relevant options from the Home Tab of the Excel Ribbon, to create a style which has all these attributes, simply highlight a cell that contains these formats and choose “New Cell Style” from the Cell Styles drop-down menu in the Styles Tab of the Excel Ribbon.

The Style dialogue will then appear. Here, we enter a name for our new cell style: let’s say we call this cell style “Angled Heading”. The Style dialogue window contains six categories of formatting information which can be activated or deactivated via a series of checkboxes. We can now switch off those categories of formatting that don’t apply. Thus, in this example, we won’t need the categories “Number”, “Border”, “Fill”, or “Protection”; so we can uncheck all of them. Next to each of the aforementioned categories, you’ll notice that Excel has picked up all the attributes of the highlighted cell; so it is not necessary to click on each category to set any options; all we need to do is click OK.

When creating a cell style in this way, it is important to realise that Excel does not apply the style to the cell or cells on which the style was based. If you wish to apply the style to the cell, you need to do so explicitly by highlighting the cell and choosing the name of your new cell style from the Cell Styles drop-down menu in the Styles section of the Home Tab of the Ribbon. Once you have created a style, you’ll notice that Excel has an extra category called custom in the Cell Styles drop-down menu and it is here that you can choose the style that you just created. Although the highlighted cell may not look any different, it will now be associated with the new style.

We would then go on to apply the style wherever it was needed throughout our workbook. Just doing this is, in itself, a big time-saver. In addition, however, if we were to change the format of our heading, all we need to do is to modify the attributes associated with our cell style and all of our headings will be automatically updated.

Author is a developer and trainer with Macresource Computer Solutions, an independent computer training company offering Microsoft Excel 2007 Classes at their central London training centre.