rAdvanced Excel:

Font Selection:We can customize the font according to our needs in Excel. This can be done in many ways. I

prefer using the Ribbon button shortcuts to do this task as it is very convenient to use. We can format entire cell text or a part of text according to our needs. As shown below select a cell and change the font type and color from “Font” section which is highlighted below.

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Bold, Underline and Italic can be applied by using keyboard short cuts. Please find below keyboard short cuts for the same.

Bold Ctrl+B

UnderlineCtrl+U

ItalicCtrl+I

I have customized text which was entered in the Excel earlier as below.

Back ground formatting:Here we will see how to fill colors in cells or a range of cells. We will see later about inserting a background picture.Select the cell or range of cells as below and fill the color using color filler as shown below.

Merge and Center:We can merger a range of cells using “Merger & Center” functionality.

There are many options in merge & Center as shown below.

Depending on the requirements we can choose one of them.Tip: Try to avoid using merging cells it will create problem with VBA. Instead use cell formatting which will give almost identical result as merge and won’t affect VBA.

Styles:Instead of selecting each and every cell and formatting it, we can use excel “Style” functionality to achieve the same result.

As shown above Excel has 3 types of Styles namely Conditional Formatting, Format as Table and Cells Styles. We will see one by one in detail.

Conditional Formatting:

Conditional Formatting has below options.

Below are the Highlight Cells Rules.

I will take below data to show you how conditional formatting works. Copy it and paste it in an Excel workbook.

Student Name Maths Science English Total Average

S1 90 79 92 261 87

S2 95 85 88 26889.3333

3S3 83 84 85 252 84S4 86 87 88 261 87S5 89 90 91 270 90S6 92 56 68 216 72

S7 93 62 69 22474.6666

7S8 81 77 70 228 76

S9 82 94 81 25785.6666

7S10 83 90 82 255 85S11 80 58 90 228 76

S12 78 44 32 15451.3333

3S13 60 32 28 120 40S14 42 80 49 171 57

S15 40 83 52 17558.3333

3S16 35 88 60 183 61

After pasting the above data in excel it will look like the below screen print.

To highlight the students who scored more than 65 in maths follow below procedure.1. Select Maths column cells as shown below.

2. Select Conditional Formatting >> Highlight Cell Rules >> Greater Than. Below window will be opened. Type the marks in highlighted cell. And press enter.

3. The result will look like this.

Similarly other cell rules such as “Less Than”, “Between”, “Equal To”, “Text that Contains”, “A Date Occurring” and “Duplicate values” can be applied.

Top/Bottom Rules:If we want to know top 10 marks in “Science” then select science range and then apply “Top 10 item”

Condition as shown below.

Below Window will appear, Click on Ok.

The result will look like the below one.

Similarly remaining Top/Bottom Rules like “Top 10 %”, “Bottom 10 Items”, “Bottom 10 %”, “Above Average” and “below Average” can be applied.

Data Bar:To view a colored bar in the cell we will use data bars. The length of the data bar indicates the value in the cell. A longer bar represents a higher value.To apply it select the entire range and select data bar as

shown below.

Select a gradient fill/solid fill according to your needs. After applying the Data Bar to above selected data the result will look like as shown below

Color Scales:Color Scale displays a two or three color gradient in a range of selected cells. The shade of the color represents the value in the cell.

To apply it select a data range and then select a color gradient from Conditional Formatting>> Color

Scales. If apply color scales to above data the result will look like as shown in the below screen print.

Icon Sets: It is similar to Data Bars and Color Scales. Instead of Data Bars and Colors it will display icons based on the icon set selected. Please find below an example for the same.

In the introduction I have mentioned that Excel has very rich reporting features and conditional formatting just proves that

You may get a doubt like “Excel is formatting the celss according to predefined values. Can we define values for 2/3-color scales,data bars and icon sets?” and the answer is yes, you can. Please follow below procedure to define custom rules for data bars, icon sets and color scales.

1. Select the data range for which you want to define the new rule.

2. Select “New Rule” option from conditional formatting as shjown below.

3. Below window should appear.

4. From Format Style, select a format style for which you want to define a new rule. I am selecting data bars here.

5. Upon selecting data bar below options will be displayed.

6. Select a type for maximum and minimum and enter values for the same.

7. Also fill the bar fields as per your wish and click on ok.

8. The result will look like below screen print.

9. To Delete the custom format defined above for the selected area, go to clear rules in Conditional formatting.

10. To edit the rules defined above go to manage rules section in conditional formatting tab.

Format as Table:We can format the data entered in an excel sheet as a table. It will help us in organizing the data in a

better way. Format as table will apply filter on the headers of the table. Filters will help us in analyzing the data easily.

To apply “Format as Table” functionality select the range of text for which the feature needs to be applied and then select a style from Style>>Format as Table. Below screen print describes the same.

Upon selecting a style below window will be displayed.

As the range of cells is already selected, there is no need to change anything in above window. However if you want to change the range, then just select the range of cells from excel.

If you select the range again then accordingly above window will populate the range.For example if I change the selected range as below highlighted portion in yellow color, then accordingly range is updated in above window.

After selecting the required range click on “OK”(I have selected entire range of cells).The table will be applied as shown below and a new tab named “Design” will be enabled.

Using Design tab, we can design the table as per the requirements.

In the below screen print I have checked all the table style options and table style is quite different

from the above one. So using Design tab we can do customizations on the table.

Cells Styles:Cell styles has many options as shown below.

Select a range of data and then apply cells as per the requirements. Below I have provided an example.