Letting Excel Design Your Worksheet with AutoFormat

Letting Excel Design Your Worksheet with AutoFormat

Although your worksheet's content is more important than its appearance, a little creative formatting can make your worksheet more attractive and readable. For example, you can add shading to rows and columns to make the spreadsheet easier to follow, add boxes around cells or lines between columns and rows, and change the typestyle for your column and row labels to make them stand out.

Excel offers a formatting feature called AutoFormat that applies a design scheme to selected cells. The design scheme controls everything from fonts and alignment to shading and borders. To use AutoFormat, follow these steps:

1. Select the cells you want to format.

2. Open the Format menu and select AutoFormat . The AutoFormat dialog box appears, displaying the available design schemes, as shown in Figure 7.1.

   Figure 7.1. Pick one of AutoFormat's design schemes for your worksheet.

   

3. Scroll down the list of designs to view additional designs.

4. Click the desired design.

5. Click OK .

Each design scheme contains settings that control the number format, borders, patterns (shading), font, alignment, row height, and column width of the selected area. You can disable some of the settings to tweak a design. When applying an AutoFormat design scheme, click the Options button to view a list of attributes the design scheme controls, as shown in Figure 7.2. Click an attribute to disable it (remove the check mark from its box). AutoFormat instantly redraws the design schemes to show how the design schemes look with the attribute disabled.

Figure 7.2. You can disable any of the attributes that the AutoFormat design scheme applies to your worksheet.

You need not accept everything AutoFormat does to the appearance of your worksheet. You can further customize the design by applying various formats to your worksheet manually, as instructed in the remainder of this chapter. You can also adjust column widths and row heights, as explained in Chapter 5, "Controlling Rows, Columns, and Cells."

Note

AutoFormat does not change any formatting you applied to the worksheet yourself. If you have all your values displayed in Currency Style, and you choose a design that displays values as plain numbers , the values in your worksheet remain in Currency Style.