As well as using and modifying Excel 2007‘s built-in cell styles, you also have the facility of creating your own. One simple way of doing this is to highlight a range of cells and apply all the formatting attributes that you want to add to your style and then turn those attribute into a cell style. When you create your cell style, Excel will pick up all the attributes from the highlighted cells and include them in the style. Let’s take an example; let’s say we want to create a cell style for headings with text angled at 45 degrees.

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

The Style dialogue window will then appear. Here, we can enter a name for our new cell style: let’s say we call this first 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 style in this way, it’s important to realise that Excel does not apply the style to the cell or cells on which the style was based. If you want 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 Excel Ribbon. Having 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 look the same, it will now be associated with the new style.

We would then proceed to apply the style wherever it was needed throughout our workbook. This, in itself, is a big time-saver. In addition, however, if we decide 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.

The author is a trainer and developer with Macresource Computer Training, an independent computer training company offering Microsoft Excel training in London and throughout the UK.

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