Replies to This Discussion

Permalink Reply by Susi Schuele on December 4, 2008 at 1:46pm

Great tip Collette! Thanks!

Permalink Reply by Kyle McCloud on December 5, 2008 at 2:30pm

Thanks Collette

Permalink Reply by Nickey Hollenbach on December 23, 2008 at 9:57am

good to know - thanks!

Permalink Reply by Cindy VonderHeide on December 31, 2008 at 8:09am

Nice tip ... thanks! I've found that this comes in handy quite frequently.

Permalink Reply by Savvy Subcontracting, C Schultz on January 30, 2009 at 9:40am

Formatting Your Data the Easy Way (XL2003/XL2007)

The endless combinations of formatting available in Excel allows you to make your worksheet more visually appealing and easier to read. A well-formatted worksheet can also help direct the attention of users to the most important information.

Often you will apply a combination of formatting attributes to a cell or a range of cells that you would like to repeat in other parts of your worksheet.

Rather than repeating the multiple steps to achieve the same effect, Excel has a Format Painter tool that allows you to quickly and easily copy the formatting of one range of cells to another range of cells or to multiple ranges of cells.



1) Click the cell or range of cells whose formatting you want to copy. If you select an entire row, the row height will also be copied. If you select an entire column, the column width will be copied;
2) Click the Format Painter tool. In Excel 2007, it's on the Home tab. In Excel 2003, it's on the Standard toolbar. If you don't see it on your 2003 toolbars, click View,Toolbars,Standard;
3) When you select the cell or range of cells where you want to copy the formatting, the Format Painter immediately pastes the formatting.

If you want to copy formatting to multiple non-adjacent cells, here's how to do it...



1) Click the cell or range of cells whose formatting you want to copy;
2) Double-click the Format Painter tool. This will turn on the Format Painter until you choose to turn it off (step 4);
3) Click the first cell or range where you want to copy the formatting. Then continue clicking each additional range of cells to copy the formatting to these cells also;
4) Click once more on the Format Painter tool to turn it off.

To copy the formatting of a range of cells

1) Click the range whose formatting you want to copy;
2) Click the Format Painter tool;
3) Click the range where you want to copy the formatting. If you click a larger range to copy to, the formatting will be repeated in the additional cells. To copy formatting to multiple ranges, double-click the Format Painter as in the previous example.

Tip Written and Created by: F Hayes, The Excel Addict http://www.theexceladdict.com