Formatting

Merged cells alternative When copying and pasting cells, I sometimes get an error message that says: By Neale Blackwood Merged cells can cause difficulties when using Excel. There is a standard tool on the toolbar called "Merge and Center". Many people use this tool to format reports, as it "merges" two or more cells [...]

 Stop Zeroes Displaying Is it possible to stop zero values displaying in a range? By Neale Blackwood That can be achieved using a Custom Number format. First select the range, then click the Format menu and select Cells (Ctrl + 1 will open the Format Cells dialog box). Click the Number tab and select [...]

View Values and Formula at the same time Is it possible to view cells' values and formulae simultaneously? By Neale Blackwood, 1 Dec 08 There is a technique that lets you see the formula and the value at the same time. This is often useful when creating or debugging a spreadsheet. Open a file [...]

Shading rows automatically I've seen spreadsheets with shading on every second row. Is there an easy way to do this, other than manually formatting the rows? By Neale Blackwood Conditional Formatting is the easy way to achieve this effect. Using alternate shading makes reading wide spreadsheets easier. First select the range you want the [...]

Format error cells Is there an easy way to highlight all the cells that have error messages By Neale Blackwood There are a couple of ways. Select cell A1, press F5, click the Special button. Select the Formulas radio button and uncheck all the entries under it except Errors. Click OK. You now have [...]

Change default Cell comments font size How do I change the default font size of cell comments? By Neale Blackwood You need to change a Windows setting to achieve this. Please note this will change the font size of other objects defined as "ToolTip" in applications. You may want to change it back, so [...]

Hiding cell contents I use the white font colour to hide values in a cell, but if the cell's fill colour is changed, it displays the entries. If you select the cells you can also see them. If Black and White is selected in Page Setup the entry will print. Is it possible to [...]

Fix for missing Fill Colours Excel won't display the cell's fill colours. The colour is there when I print out, but it doesn't display on the screen. The file is OK when I view it on another computer. Is there a setting I need to change? By Neale Blackwood You need to change a [...]

Lining up charts and other graphics Is there an easy way to position charts so that they line up exactly on the left-hand side? By Neale Blackwood If you hold down the Alt key (next to the space bar) when you move the chart around you will see that it snaps to the cell [...]

Easy and Quick Formatting Format Painter By Neale Blackwood One of the more useful toolbar icons is the Format Painter. It looks like a yellow paintbrush. It allows you to click on a cell that has a format you want to use and then click the Format Painter (notice that the mouse cursor shape [...]

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