Formatting Your Text

The best way to produce a good-looking worksheet is to worry about the text first and the formatting second. Type in your text and then make the changes in the appearance. Bold, italic, and other formatting changes are easy to accomplish from the Formatting toolbar.

All the buttons on the Formatting toolbar are shortcuts to items that appear in the Format menu. The menu, however, offers a great many formatting options in addition to those on the toolbar. You can use the dialog boxes available through the menu items to fine-tune some of the special formatting effects.

Formatting Characters

In the Normal template, which is the one applied when you create a new workbook, the default font is Arial and the font size is 10 points.

Just like Word, PowerPoint, and FrontPage, Excel displays various fonts on the Formatting toolbar and provides a fast way to change the font. You can select a font from the Font box on the Formatting toolbar. Change the style (bold, italic, and underline), and font size from the Formatting toolbar. For example, when typing the contents of a cell, if you click the Formatting toolbar's Bold button (press Ctrl+B), the rest of what you type in the cell will appear in bold.

To make better use of your time, this chapter does not go into great character-formatting detail. In case you jumped to this part of the book that covers Excel without reading earlier chapters, you should review Chapter 6, "Formatting Characters, Paragraphs, and Pages," to see how to apply formatting to cell contents. The same character formats apply to your cells as text in Word documents.

In the following steps, you change the font, font style, and font size for the title in the My Budget workbook that you've created over the past few chapters. You'll also change the font style for the column headings. If the My Budget file isn't open right now, open it before you begin the exercise.

Select cell A1.
Click the Font down arrow on the Formatting toolbar.
Scroll down the list until you see Courier New and then click it.
Click the Font Size down arrow on the Formatting toolbar.
Scroll down the list until you see 16. Click it.
Click the Bold button on the Formatting toolbar.
Select cells B3:M3.
Click the Bold button on the Formatting toolbar.
Click the Italic button on the Formatting toolbar.
Click any cell to deselect the range. Figure 46.5 shows what your formatted text should look like.

Figure 46.5. Font, font size, and font style changes.

Changing Cell Alignment

The default alignment for data is General . When you enter data into a cell, numbers, dates, and times automatically align with the right side of the cell. Text aligns with the left side of the cell. You can change the alignment of information at any time. For instance, you may want to fine-tune the appearance of column headings across columns, or you can right-align column headings across the columns to line up with the numbers that are right-aligned.

In the next few steps, you right-align the column headings in the My Budget workbook.

Select cells B3:M3.
Choose Format, Cells. Excel opens the Format Cells dialog box.
Click the Alignment tab, as shown in Figure 46.6.

Figure 46.6. The Alignment tab in the Format Cells dialog box.
Click the Horizontal down arrow and choose Right.
Click OK to confirm your choice.
Click any cell to deselect the range. Excel adjusts the text according to the alignment option you have chosen . In this case, the column headings are aligned right, as shown in Figure 46.7.

Figure 46.7. Column headings aligned right.

To repeat the alignment format command in another cell, use the Repeat Format Cells command from the Edit menu or press the F4 (Repeat) key. Actually, you can repeat any format command in another cell by using the F4 key.

Types of Alignments

The Alignment tab in the Format Cells dialog box makes several types of alignments available. The Horizontal alignment options let you specify left/right alignment in the cell(s). Table 46.1 lists and describes the Horizontal alignment options.

Table 46.1. Excel Horizontal Alignment Options

Alignment	What It Does
General	Aligns numbers and dates with the right side of the cell and text with the left side.
Left (Indent)	Aligns selected data with the left side of the cell.
Center	Centers data within the cell.
Right	Aligns selected data with the right side of the cell.
Fill	Repeats the data to fill the entire width of the cell.
Justify	Aligns text with the right and left side of the cell. Use with the Wrap Text option in the Text Control section on the Alignment tab.
Center Across Selection	Centers a title or other text inside a range of cells, such as over columns.

The Vertical alignment options let you specify how you want the text aligned in relation to the top and bottom of the cell(s).

Text orientation, located on the right side of the Alignment tab, is explained in the next section. The Text control options are discussed later in this chapter.