Formatting
What you need to understand
Formatting changes how data looks, not what it is. You must be able to apply number formats - general, number with a set number of decimal places, currency with a symbol, percentage, date and time - and to add or remove the thousands separator.
Cell formatting covers font, size, bold/italic/underline, font colour and fill colour, borders, horizontal and vertical alignment, text orientation, and wrap text so long labels stay inside the cell. You should know how to merge cells and centre them, adjust column width and row height manually or with autofit (double-click the boundary between two column headers), and apply cell styles.
Also learn the Format Painter to copy formatting from one cell to another, and conditional formatting, which changes a cell's appearance automatically when a rule is met (for example, values above a limit turning red).
Traps
- A percentage is stored as a fraction: typing 25 into a percentage-formatted cell shows 2500%. Enter 0.25, or type 25% including the sign.
- Increasing decimal places displays more digits but does not change the underlying value.
- Merged cells cause errors when sorting or pasting and are best avoided in data lists.
#####across a cell means the column is too narrow, not that the calculation failed.
Rule of thumb: change the value in the cell and the appearance in the Format Cells dialog - if a figure looks wrong, check which of the two you actually need to fix.