Formatting a Worksheet

The ability to enter your data into Excel worksheets and to use Excel’s powerful mathematical capabilities to your advantage forms the foundation you’ll need to extract actionable intelligence from your organizational data. But, Excel can also help you do so much more. Large worksheets with thousands, or perhaps millions, of data entries can be difficult to read. This can be especially true if you’re working with a variety of numeric data types, such as dollar amounts, percentages, and figures with varied numbers of decimal places. Plus, you may need to organize your data according to department, region, job role, or other important distinctions. And, some data is simply more important than other data and should stand out even at first glance. In other words, you could potentially have a limitless need to present data in a wide variety of formats. Fortunately, Excel 2010 allows you to do just that.

Excel provides you with a staggering variety of formatting options that can help you present your data in precisely the right way to suit your needs. Understanding how to use, and, perhaps more importantly, when and why to use these formatting options will help you make your worksheets easy to read, professional in their appearance, and simply more useful. Additionally, you can avoid the hassle of the wasted time, frustration, and headaches that can accompany trying to force data to behave the way you want it to when it’s not properly formatted.

Lessons

• Modify Fonts
• Add Borders and Colors to Worksheets
• Apply Number Formats
• Align Cell Contents
• Apply Styles and Themes
• Apply Basic Conditional Formatting
• Modifying Fonts and Adding Hyperlinks

Lab : Modifying Fonts and Adding Hyperlinks

Lab : Adding Borders and Colors to Worksheets

Lab : Applying Number Formats

Lab : Aligning Cell Contents

Lab : Applying Styles and Themes

Lab : Applying Basic Conditional Formatting

Lab : Creating a Template

After completing this module, students will be able to:

• Modify fonts.
• Add borders and colors to worksheets.
• Apply number formats.
• Align cell contents.
• Apply styles and themes.
• Apply basic conditional formatting.
• Create and use templates.

Printing Workbooks

You put a lot of hard work into creating, populating, and formatting your workbook. Now it’s time to share the final product with your colleagues, supervisor, or organizational leaders. In some cases, you may simply need to email your workbook file to the necessary recipients or project it in front of a live audience, but this will not always be the case. For any number of reasons, you may need to print hard copies of your workbooks to share with others. Your workbooks may contain multiple worksheets, each of which could contain thousands of data entries, formulas, and results. Do you really want to print that many pages to distribute to your audience? What information should you include and what do you do if you need to print a bit from here and a bit from there?

Fortunately, Excel provides you with a wide array of options when it comes to printing hard copies of your workbooks. Understanding how to set your worksheets up for printing and how to print only what you need will allow you to deliver only the necessary critical information to your audience. This will not only save your organization paper and money, but it will also prevent your document recipients from having to sift through excessive amounts of irrelevant data.

Lessons

• Preview and Print a Workbook
• Configuring and Previewing a Print Job

Lab : Configuring and Previewing a Print Job

Lab : Defining the Page Layout

After completing this module, students will be able to:

• Preview and print a workbook.
• Define the page layout.

Managing Workbooks

So far, you have largely worked within workbooks and worksheets to enter, view, analyze, format, and present your organizational data. But there’s more to being proficient in Excel than simply working within your workbooks. What if you need to add or remove worksheets from your workbooks? What if you want to preserve certain data, but not display it to colleagues or supervisors? Perhaps you need to work with multiple workbooks or multiple worksheets within a single workbook simultaneously. And, after a time, there’s a good chance you’ll have amassed a large number of workbook files that you’ll need to reference later, perhaps even years down the road. These are but a few of the situations in which you’ll need to know how to manage your Excel workbooks.

Managing the overall structure of your workbooks, manipulating how you view your workbooks, and knowing how to find the workbook you need when you need it are all critical tasks you’ll need to perform from time to time. Understanding what functionality is available and knowing how to use it when you need it will ensure that you’re able to get the most out of the workbooks, worksheets, and data you’ve already worked so hard to create.

Lessons

• Manage Worksheets
• Manage Workbook and Worksheet Views
• Managing Worksheets

Lab : Managing Worksheets

Lab : Managing Workbook and Worksheet View

Lab : Managing Workbook Properties

After completing this module, students will be able to:

• Manage worksheets.
• Manage workbook and worksheet views.

Manage workbook properties.