Formatting and Organising Your Spreadsheet

In this lesson

• Making headings stand out with bold and font size
• Adding a worksheet title, and when Merge & Center helps
• Alignment — and why Excel treats text and numbers differently
• Formatting numbers as currency
• Adjusting column widths with AutoFit, and row heights
• Adding borders — without overdoing them
• Fill colours, and keeping the text easy to read
• Copying formatting quickly with Format Painter
• Organising a simple worksheet more professionally

The ideas behind this lesson

Start with the headings

At the moment Excel understands the information perfectly well, but visually there is not much structure. Select the two headings — Expense and Amount — and make them bold from the Home tab. Straight away there is a clear distinction between the headings and the information underneath them. You can increase the font size slightly too, though headings do not need to be large. The purpose of formatting is to make information easier to understand, not simply to decorate the spreadsheet.

Adding a title

Insert a row above the headings and type Monthly Expenses. Make it bold and slightly larger. You will also notice Merge & Center, which combines several cells visually and centres the title across them. For a small worksheet like this it works well — but do not feel you need to merge cells every time you create a heading. Here it is simply a clear title for a small worksheet.

Alignment

Excel normally aligns text to the left and numbers to the right. That is genuinely useful, because it helps you tell the two apart at a glance. For the headings you might choose to centre them instead — select the heading cells and choose Centre from the Alignment section of the Home tab. Notice that you are not changing the information, only how Excel displays it. That distinction matters, and it comes up again in the next section.

Currency formatting

The amounts are currently just numbers, but they represent money. Rather than typing a dollar sign into every cell by hand, select the amounts and choose a currency format from the Number section of the Home tab. Excel then displays the dollar symbol and the decimal places consistently, and — importantly — it still recognises the values as numbers, which matters a great deal once we start using formulas.

You will also see options such as Number, Currency, Accounting, Percentage and Date. We will come back to some of those later. For now the idea worth holding onto is that formatting changes how a value is displayed without necessarily changing the value itself.

Column widths and AutoFit

Sometimes a column is too narrow for what is inside it. You can drag the boundary between the column headings to widen it manually — but Excel also has AutoFit. Put your pointer on the line between columns A and B and double-click, and Excel adjusts the width to fit the contents. It is a small feature that you will use constantly. The same idea works with row height.

Borders

Select the data and use the Borders option on the Home tab. You could apply all borders, or just a border around the important sections. Be careful here: adding borders to every possible cell can make a spreadsheet harder to read rather than easier. Use formatting to create structure — not simply because the option exists.

Fill colour

Select the heading row and choose a fill colour, then check that the text is still easy to read. If the background is dark you may need lighter text; if it is light, darker text will usually read better. For workplace spreadsheets, simple and consistent formatting is almost always better than many different colours.

Format Painter

Once one cell is formatted exactly the way you want it, you do not need to repeat every step on the next one. Select the cell that already has the formatting, click Format Painter, then click the cell you want it applied to. Excel copies the formatting without copying the content. On larger worksheets this saves a surprising amount of time.

Before and after

Compare the worksheet now with where it started. The information has not really changed — the same expenses, the same amounts. What it has now is a clear title, recognisable headings, consistent currency formatting, sensible column widths and a simple visual structure. That makes it far easier for someone else to understand, and that is the whole purpose of good spreadsheet formatting.

Practise this yourself

Before you move on, build a small two-column worksheet of your own. Use Item and Cost, or Product and Price, and enter five items. Then work through the list below.

Do not worry about making it perfect. The aim is simply to practise the tools.