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 colour. 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:

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  Click on cell A1 with your left mouse button


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  Click on Format from the menu bar


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  From the menu that drops down, click the word "Cells" with your left mouse button


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  The Format dialogue pops up again


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  This time, click on the word "Font", instead of "Alignment"


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  Your dialogue box will look like the one below (in Excel 2000)

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  From the dialogue box, change the Font Style to Bold


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  Change the size to 8


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  Click the OK button at the bottom


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  Your spreadsheet will now look like the one below

The cells don't have to be white. You can change them to whatever colour you want. We'll add a spot of colour the ours cells.

 

Changing the cell colour

To add a splash of colour 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.)

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  With the cells A2 to A5 highlighted, click on Format from the menu bar


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  From the drop down menu, click on "Cells"


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  The format dialogue box pops up once more


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  This time, click on the word "Patterns"


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  The dialogue box will now look like the one below

Click on any of the coloured squares that takes 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 your 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 colour will change from white to the colour 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 colour or pattern.

Once you have the numbers formatted in a different colour, click on the cell A1. Now do exactly the same thing, only this time choose a contrasting colour for the text. Your spreadsheet will now look something like the one below:

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