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Daily Dose of Excel » All Tags » Formatting (RSS)

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  • Sheet Tab Colors

    CR rants: One thing about Excel 2007 that really bugs me are the tab colors. Most of the choices look so washed out, rather than a nice solid color. One does not have a choice when Excel makes the tab text white or black. Sometimes, Excel chooses a white font for the text [...] Read More...
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  • Date Formatting

    In New Zealand, we format our dates dd/mm/yy. However, the United States format as mm/dd/yy. When I see a date by itself, like 12/01/09, I ask “is this the 12th of January or the 1st of December”? When I started working with Oracle RDBMS, a habit I picked up was to format dates dd-mon-yyyy. This avoided the dd/mm [...] Read More...

  • The Whole Column

    Nothing wrong with this sheet, right? Until you get to the end… The teeny-tiny vertical scrollbar handle is usually a give away. Hundreds of rows tacked onto the end of the list to give the illusion that the whole column has been formatted. The trouble with formatting columns as per the above image is that it causes the [...] Read More...

  • Numbers in Disguise

    It is possible to get a cell to display one thing, but store another. Create a Custom Format by right-clicking the cell, select Format Cells…, then from the Number tab select Custom. In the Type box use whatever text you want displayed, but be sure to enclose it in “double-quotes”. I admit, this is a pretty dirty trick, [...] Read More...

  • Converting Cells Formatted as Text

    Excel has a Text format that can be applied to cells. When a cell is formatted as Text, anything you type in the cell will appears in the cell. That may seem obvious, but it applies to numbers and formulas too. For instance, if you type a formula in a cell formatted [...] Read More...

  • The Currency Format

    If you type a number into an unformatted cell in Excel, that number is stored in the Double data type. When you format that number, you show it in a specific way, but you don't change the number. For instance, if you format the number 1 as a Comma style, you get 1.00. [...] Read More...
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  • Golf Scores

    A couple of my golf buddies and I were debating the handicaps of a course we regularly play. Each hole of a course is handicapped 1 through 18 with 1 being the hardest hole and 18 the easiest. Handicaps are used to allow golfers of differing abilities to complete equitably. Because my [...] Read More...
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  • Formatting Taskpane

    In order to perform my most common formatting operations, I'm going to try to use a userform with only those operations on it. These 16 buttons should cover about 95% of the cell formatting I do. I set the Ctrl+1 shortcut, which normally shows the Format Cells dialog, to show my userform instead. Now [...] Read More...
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  • Applying the Comma Style

    I like the Comma style. It's by far my favorite. What I don't like is how hard it is to apply that style with the keyboard. In 2003, all you have to do is: Alt + O + S + DownArrow + UpArrow x 4 + Enter Unless you're me. If you're me, [...] Read More...
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  • Styles in Excel

    Hi all, I’ve just published a new article on my website. Here is the introduction: “This article explains how you can use styles to ease maintenance of your spreadsheet models. Microsoft has made it very easy to dress up your worksheets with all sorts of fill patterns, borders and other frills. Because formatting of cells is often done [...] Read More...

  • Star Rating Number Format

    It’s Wednesday night. That means I’m drinking Tangueray and reviewing football games (for entertainment purposes only). I like to rate games on a three-star system. Three stars means refinance the house and fly to Vegas. Two stars means I really like a team. And one star means I’d have as [...] Read More...
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