How to Use Cell Styles in Excel: A Step-by-Step Guide
(Note: This guide on how to use cell styles in Excel is suitable for all Excel versions including Office 365)
Consider an Excel sheet that has data of different types and formats. The data might be downloaded, inserted, or circulated between users one after the other. In those cases, each data might have different formatting depending on the user settings. This will make the data unpleasant to look at and hinders its readability.
You would then want to modify and organize the data in a well-formatted and orderly fashion. You can select each cell or cell range and modify the look and format of the cell manually. However, this task can be a little daunting and time-consuming.
Here, using the Cell Styles option in Excel you can easily modify the formatting and profile of the cell and its contents with the click of a button.
In this article, I will show you how to apply built-in styles, create custom styles, and remove the cell styles in Excel when not necessary.
You’ll Learn:
Watch this video on How to Use Cell Styles in Excel in an easy way
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What Are Cell Styles in Excel?
Cell Style refers to formatting and features that you can customize in a cell. The features that can be modified using cell styles include the font style, font color, color fill, format type, cell borders, cell color, and much more.
Cell Styles have similar characteristics to Conditional Formatting. In Conditional Formatting, the format of the cells is changed when specific conditions or criteria are met. Whereas, Cell Styles are static i.e. you can change the cell styles whenever you want based on your needs.
The cell styles option will be very useful when you have to change the style formatting of a group of cells altogether instead of changing them one by one. You can create a particular cell style by including all the cell format aspects like font color, size, font style, fill, borders, etc., and then use them whenever needed.
Using the built-in or custom-created cell styles will make all the cells look more consistent and give a professional finish to the data, thereby making it easier to read.
There are a variety of options available when it comes to cell styling in Excel. You can do the following:
- Apply the Built-In Cell Styles in Excel
- Create a Custom Cell Style
- Copy and Duplicate an Existing Cell Style
- Modify an Existing Cell Style
- Remove the Cell Style from the Cells
- Delete a Cell Style
In this guide, I will explain how to use Cell Styles with an example.
Consider an example, where you have a consolidated list of sales made by an automobile company in 11 years.
When you enter the data onto an Excel sheet, the formatting will be different for numbers and texts. Also, there is no distinction or highlights to show the differentiation of data. You can now use the Cell Styles to format the cells and their contents.
How to Use Cell Styles in Excel?
We have recently understood what cell styles are and how you can customize cells using them. Let us now see how to use cell styles effectively to get the best profile overall.
Apply Built-In Cells Styles
First, let us see how to apply the built-in cell styles in Excel. This is the first and foremost step when it comes to formatting a cell. After this, we can see how to create custom styles and change them.
- First, select a cell or a group of cells. In this case, let us apply the cell style to the headers i.e. the vehicle types from rows A5 to F5.
- Now, navigate to Home. Under the Styles section, click on the dropdown from Cell Styles. When you click the dropdown, you can see a variety of cell styles with different fill colors, border colors, and fonts. Since we are formatting the heading, let us select the Heading 2 style.
- Once you select your desired cell style, the style with the formatting will be applied to the selected cells.
Create a Custom Cell Style
Even though there are a variety of cell styles to choose from, there might be some instances where you might not be satisfied with the available options. In such instances, you can create your custom style with the necessary options to suit your purpose.
- To create a custom cell style, first, select a cell or range of cells.
- Go-to Home. From the dropdown from Cell Styles, click on New Cell Style.
- This opens up a Style dialog box. Under Styles Includes (By example), you can see the different format options the cell is formatted for. You can choose to uncheck the checkboxes if you don’t want to include that particular aspect in the cells.
Now, let’s get to formatting the styles.
- From the Style Name textbox, you can set the name of the custom style.
- To change the other aspects of the cell, click on Format. This opens up the Format dialog box. Under the tabs provided, you can change the formatting type, font, border, color, and alignment of the cells. Additionally, you can also choose to lock and protect the cells to prevent them from being edited.
- After making all the necessary changes, click OK.
- This adds the custom style in the Cell Styles dropdown.
- If you want to change the cell style, you can do it with a click. Select the cells you want to format, then select the custom format you created from the Cell Styles dropdown.
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Customize an Existing Style
When working on cell styles, you might sometimes feel the existing styles to be a little inadequate. You also don’t want to create a cell style from scratch. In such cases, you can just tweak and modify the existing styles a little to create your style.
- To modify an existing style, click on the dropdown from Cell Styles.
- Right-click on the style you want to customize and click on Modify.
- When you click on Modify, the Style dialog box opens.
- In the same way, check the checkboxes for the formatting features you want to include in the cell style. For additional settings related to font style, color, border, alignment, and protection, click on Format.
- This opens the Format Cells dialog box. Select and customize all the necessary options and click on OK.
- Now, if you click on the dropdown from Cell Styles, you can see the default built-in font modified based on your input options.
Note: To change the modified built-in style to its default state, right-click on the style and click on Delete.
Duplicate a Cell Style
It is always a good practice to copy a cell style and then modify them instead of overriding the existing cell style. In such cases, you can duplicate a built-in or custom cell style and modify them.
- To duplicate a cell style, go to Home and click on the dropdown from Cell Styles. This shows you a list of built-in and custom cell styles.
- Now, right-click on the style you want to duplicate and select Duplicate.
- This in turn opens the Styles dialog box. Select the format features you want to include using the Format option.
- Click OK.
- Now, the duplicated font gets saved under the Custom section of the Cell Styles dropdown. You can now use the style whenever needed.
Remove the Cell Style
In case you are not satisfied with the cell style, you can either change the cell style or remove them.
- To remove the cell style, first, select the cells with a particular cell style.
- Navigate to Home. Click on the dropdown from Cell Styles. Select Normal.
- This removes the cell styles for the formatted cells and the cells are reset to the default cell styling.
Delete Cell Styles
Often, deleting and removing a particular thing might be synonymous. Here, deleting a cell style and removing a cell style are two different things. When removing, you remove the formatting of the cells and change them back to their default state. When you delete a Cell Style, you delete the particular cell style from the repository.
You can delete a cell style if you are not satisfied with the style formatting or if you won’t need them anymore.
- To delete a cell style, go to Home. Click on the dropdown from the Cell Styles.
- Right-click on the cell style you want to delete and click on Delete.
- This deletes the particular cell style from the cell style repository.
Note: When you delete a cell style, all the cells which have the particular cell style will be deleted and the cells will be set to Normal (default) cell style.
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Frequently Asked Questions
What is the difference between Cell Style and Table Style?
Cell Styles refer to the attributes such as cell color, font size, border color, and alignment that pertain only to the particular cell or a range of cells. On the other hand, Table Styles refer to the attributes of the table such as color formatting, borders, and styles as a whole.
What are the attributes that you can modify using Cell Styles?
Using the Format option in Cell Styles, you can change the format of the cells, alignment of the content, font size, font color, cell color, border, and even protect the cells from being edited.
How to reset the cell styles to default in Excel?
To reset the cell styles to default, first, select the cells and then go to Home. From the Cell Styles dropdown, click on Normal.
Closing Thoughts
Cell Styles help combine a lot of attributes and aspects of a cell into a single click. They are an essential factor in Excel that greatly help in improving the readability and presentability of the data.
In this article, we saw how to apply a cell style, modify, duplicate a cell style, create a custom cell style, remove a cell style, and even delete them. Depending on your needs, you can choose to use any option that suits your purpose the best.
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Simon Calder
Chris “Simon” Calder was working as a Project Manager in IT for one of Los Angeles’ most prestigious cultural institutions, LACMA.He taught himself to use Microsoft Project from a giant textbook and hated every moment of it. Online learning was in its infancy then, but he spotted an opportunity and made an online MS Project course - the rest, as they say, is history!
