LESSON 2

Formatting cells
Centering text in a cell comes under the heading of Formatting. Things like making the text bold,
changing the font, and adding some color also come under Formatting. There is a menu in Excel
devoted to the subject - the Format menu. Let's start with centering the data in the cells.
Centering Data in an Excel Cell

If you are following along from the previous sections, you should now have a spreadsheets with
cells highlighted. To center the data in your four highlighted cells, do the following:

 Click on the word "Format" on the menu bar

 A menu drops down
 Click on the word "cells" with your left mouse button

When you click on the word "Cells" from the menu bar, you get a dialogue box popping up. The
one below:

The words across the top (Number, Alignment, Font, etc) are the headings for Tab Strips. The
Tab Strip that is showing is the Number tab strip. We'll meet this one a little later. We need the
Alignment Tab Strip, however. So click on the word "Alignment". The dialogue box will change
to the one below:
The part of the dialogue box we're interested in is the "Text alignment" section. There are two
drop down boxes in this section: Horizontal and Vertical. The Horizontal drop down box has the
word "General"; the Vertical drop down box has the word "Bottom" in it. We'll change these.

 Click the little black down-pointing arrow on the right hand side of the Horizontal box
 A drop down list appears

Font formatting in Excel

You can change the font of your text and numbers, and make it bold. You can also change the
size of the font and the font color. We'll first format the text in the cell A1, from our spreadsheet
in the previous section.

To format the text in the cell A1, then, do this:

 Click on cell A1 with your left mouse button

 Click on Format from the menu bar
 From the menu that drops down, click the word "Cells" with your left mouse button
 The Format dialogue pops up again
 This time, click on the word "Font", instead of "Alignment"
 Your dialogue box will look like the one below

 From the dialogue box, change the Font Style to Bold

 Change the size to 8
 Click the OK button at the bottom
 Your spreadsheet will now look like the one below
The cells don't have to be white. You can change them to whatever color you want. We'll add a
spot of color cells.

Changing the cell color

To add a splash of color to your cells, first highlight the cells you want to change. In our case,
highlight the cells A2 to A5. (We'll do cell A1 after we've done the number cells.)

 With the cells A2 to A5 highlighted, click on Format from the menu bar
 From the drop down menu, click on "Cells"
 The format dialogue box pops up once more
 This time, click on the word "Patterns"
 The dialogue box will now look like the one below

Click on any of the colored squares that take your fancy. If you'd prefer a pattern, click the black
down-pointing arrow on the drop down box to the right of "Pattern". Select a pattern that takes
your fancy. When you’re done, click the OK button at the bottom. Or you could click on the Font
tab strip first, and change the text to bold. Then click OK.

When you click OK, the cell color will change from white to the color or pattern you have
chosen. If you don't like it, you click on Edit from the menu bar, then click "Undo format cell".
Or just try again and choose another color or pattern.
Once you have the numbers formatted in a different color, click on the cell A1. Now do exactly
the same thing, only this time choose a contrasting color for the text. Your spreadsheet will now
look something like the one below:

EXERCISE 1A
Open Exercise 1 add color to your columns. SAVE AS to Exercise 1A