Save Time With Cell Styles in Excel 2007

by Carol Alexander


Excel boasts a very wide variety of formats that you can apply to your cells. Naturally, when creating your worksheets you want your formatting to be consistent. Cell Styles provide you with an excellent way of achieving this.

Cell Styles are located in the Style section of the Home Tab of Excel’s Ribbon. When you click the Cell Styles button, the categorised Cell Styles gallery is revealed. The gallery provides a live preview; just hover over any of the styles to temporarily change the current selection within your worksheets, giving you a preview of what your data will look like if you choose that particular style.

The first benefit of using styles is that you apply several formats in one operation. For example, say we choose the style called "Heading One"; we automatically change the size, alignment and colour of our text. We can speed up the formatting process even further by using the Format Painter to copy styles into the other cells or even other worksheets. Simply highlight an area that already has a cell style applied, double-click on the Format Painter to make sure it stays highlighted then drag across the appropriate range(s) of cells. When you have finished, click once on the Format Painter to deactivate it.

Having applied cell styles in various parts of a workbook, you can take advantage of the most important benefit offered by styles; if we modify the attributes associated with any of the styles used in a workbook, the formatting of all cells to which those styles have been applied will automatically be updated.

Naturally, you can also modify a style definition; when doing so, it doesn’t matter which cells are highlighted since you are not directly applying formats to any cell. To modify the attributes of a Cell Style, click on the Cell Styles button, right click on the name of the style and then choose "Modify". This will bring up the six categories of formats which can be included in a style: Number, Alignment, Font, Border, Fill and Protection. This is a fairly comprehensive list including, as it does, just about everything that Excel has to offer in the way of formatting.

You will notice that you have the facility of activating and deactivating categories as necessary. Any categories that do not apply to a particular style can simply remain deactivated (i.e., checkbox not ticked). Simply click on each relevant category and make your selections. When you click OK to confirm these changes, all cells to which the style has been applied will be automatically updated.


The author is a training consultant with Macresource Computer Solutions, an independent computer training company offering Microsoft Excel 2007 training courses at their central London training centre.