Welcome back to our course on Excel 2013.
In this section, we’re going to finish off our review of the basics of formatting a worksheet
and we’re going to concentrate on Borders in this section.
But before we do, there’s just one other little thing I want to cover on Styles.
In the previous section, we applied a style to a couple of the heading and a couple of
columns on this worksheet and we also applied some direct formatting to the Cost and Recharge
columns.
If you want to remove a cell style, it’s pretty straightforward.
Let’s take this particular one.
We applied a cell style to the category cells here.
If I go into the Cell Styles Command in the Styles Group on the Home tab, if at any stage
you want to remove the style from a cell, all you have to do is select Normal.
And when you select Normal, then the Style selection you previously applied is removed
and the cell style, the default cell style is Normal.
Pretty much the same as it is in a program like Word.
So every cell by default has a format of Normal and you’re applying other than normal styles
to achieve the sort of affects that we’ve looked at so far.
The main formatting option I want to look at in this section is the use of borders and
borders can provide a very good way of focusing attention on to the key points of a worksheet
and also can help to segregate data and data types.
If we take this particular expenses sheet that we’ve got here, if I were to select
all of the cells that actually have data in them, so I’m going to start at A1, mouse
down and drag down to F8.
So I’ve got everything selected.
I can apply a border very simply.
If you look on the Home tab in the Font Group there is here a Bottom Border button or what
appears to be a Bottom Border button.
But if I click on the drop down, I’ll see that I actually have a whole range of border
options.
Now the reason that it says Bottom Border there on the button is that when you select
one of the border options the one you select becomes the one on that button.
It gives you a one click access to one of these many options.
Now let’s look at some of the options.
If I’ve got a group of cells selected which at the moment I have and I were to just click,
for example, Bottom Border.
Let me do that and click away.
What you should be able to make out is that there is now a border but only at the bottom
of the group of cells that I had selected.
Let me select again.
Now this time what I’m going to do is I’m going to select All Borders.
Now watch what happens this time.
Now again I’ll click away and you’ll now see that I have a full set of borders everywhere
and this also emphasizes, of course, the merged cell in the first row.
So that’s basically how borders work and it shows you how straightforward it is to
put borders on a selection.
Now sometimes you may want something other than the default bordering that occurs with
Excel 2013 and you can actually change a lot of aspects of the bordering.
For example, let’s suppose that I wanted to really emphasize the Cost column here.
If I select that column with its heading of Cost and go back into the drop down next to
the Borders button; note the Borders button is now All Borders because that’s the last
Command I executed.
Click on there and this time say Thick Box Border, click away.
You notice that the outer box border on those selected cells is now thicker than the others.
Now with the use of the Border Tools, you can build up some pretty sophisticated borders.
And there’s one particularly good way of doing this that lets you see exactly what’s
going on and that is if you make a selection, I’m going to select these cells and then
on the border drop down this time I’m going to go for the bottom option, More Borders.
What I actually see is the Format Cells dialog, the one we’ve seen a few times before.
But this time the Border tab is selected and with the Border tab, I can pretty much draw
the sort of border that I want.
Now if you look at that carefully at the moment you’ll see that I’ve got a thick Border
on the right, yep because that’s the one that butts up to cost which has got a thicker
border.
And the border everywhere else is the same.
Now supposing I was going to make that vertical inner border there a dashed line what I would
do is if I choose one of the patterns, one of the styles of line over here, what about
that dashed dot line?
That one and then click on this vertical line in the little picture, that becomes a dot-dash
line.
If with the horizontal line I select that that will also be a dot-dash line.
If I wanted to make the left hand line thick choose a thick line, click on the left hand
line there, and the buttons around the edge give me toggles.
So if for instance I wanted to toggle on and off the bottom border, bear in mind that I’ve
still got this thick line selected.
If I click once now I get the thick line at the bottom.
If I click it again, I have no line at the bottom at all.
So you can see how I’ve drawn a much more sort of complex Border pattern using this
approach.
Click on OK, click away, and you’ll see the sort of border pattern that I’ve got
now.
I’ve got the dash-dotted lines horizontally and vertically inside, thick on the left and
right.
The right one carried over from the cost here.
And no Border line at all at the bottom.
Now you should be able to see from that, that with a little bit of judicious use of that
dialog, you can achieve pretty much any pattern of borders that you want.
Now before we move on I just want to point out a couple of things in relation to touch.
The use of touch for all of this is pretty much the same; you do all the same kinds of
things.
Because you may well be using the commands on the Ribbon quite a bit more you may want
to use that option of spacing the Ribbon.
So you go up to the button on the Quick Access Toolbar that lets you switch between the two,
go for the Touch option, space everything out.
You can now get to buttons like the ones in the Alignment Group more easily.
If you look at the Category Column where the word Travel is in Row 7 it’s become bottom
aligned again somehow.
I think my finger must have slipped at some stage.
That’s the sort of thing that can happen from time to time.
Select that cell just by touching it to select it.
You can see the selection box around it and then for vertical alignment, you just tap
the vertical alignment, the middle alignment bottom in the Alignment Group to restore that
to Middle Alignment.
And then pretty much everything else you might want to do you can do with your fingers.
So if you wanted to change the border on that click the drop down and perhaps you could
say Thick Box Border and having the wider settings will really help you to use touch
to achieve the same kinds of effect on a touch device.
The other thing to remember, of course, whenever you’re working with this, if you’re going
for a particular cell like that one for instance, if you touch it bring up the mini toolbar,
you can access things like Font, Fill, Clear, and so on.
And then, of course, you have the drop down at the right with various other commands on
it as well.
So the touch equivalent of these pretty much follows the same pattern.
So now here’s something for you to do.
This is Example 2 from the worksheets that you got with the course.
What I want you to do is on Sheet 1 where we have these Opening Hours where you should
already have changed some of the content, so you should be looking at 24 hour clock
for example.
What I’d like you to try to do is to format this a little bit better.
I don’t want you to add any data at this stage; we’ll be doing that a little bit
later on.
But I would like you to make the sheet theme-compatible, so it’s theme sympathetic if you like.
So let’s not have any direct formatting, do everything according to the styles available
in each of the themes.
And also add a border or some borders in some way that brings out the structure of this
data.
Now that’s Example 2 and when you’ve had a go at it, if you want to see what I did
with it take a look at Example 3.
That’s it for this section.
We finished now with the basics of formatting a Worksheet.
I’ll see you in the next section.