Three Clever Formatting Tricks to Try in Microsoft Excel

 Quick Tips:

• Creating workbooks in Microsoft Excel is easier when you can quickly present your data in a visually appealing way.
• You don’t have to format each cell individually — there are several shortcuts that save you time and effort.
• Use clever formatting tricks in Excel like the fill handle and number formatting to make your workbooks look slick and professional.

Spreadsheets shouldn’t be dull and dry — if you want people to read them, that is. Learn a few tricks to make formatting your data easy and create Excel workbooks that get engagement from your colleagues.

Formatting Tricks in Excel 1: Using the Fill Handle

Step 1: Open an existing Excel workbook. Here we have an unfinished table showing profits for a small business.

Step 2: You want to complete the Month column, but you don’t want to type each month in manually. No problem, just click cell A2 (January) and hover the cursor over the bottom right corner of the cell. You’ll see a small black plus sign appear — this is the fill handle.

Step 3: Hold the fill handle and drag it down to cell A13 to fill in the months in order. However, if you had hundreds or thousands of cells to fill, this could take time. Instead, you can double-click the fill handle to complete all entries to the end of the table.