Format in Excel 365 2016 2013 2007 2003

Apply or remove cell borders

Exist several ways to apply or remove cell borders, you can choose anyone:

Custom cell format

Excel includes a variety of built-in formats that cover general, numeric, currency, percentage, exponential, date, time, and custom numeric formats. You can also design your own custom formats based on one of the built-in formats.

Using advanced filtering

In addition to manual data filtering Excel enables fully automated filtering based on data from the specified range of cells. Before you can use the advanced filtering feature, you must set up a criteria range. A criteria range is a designated range on a worksheet that conforms to certain requirements.

Grouping and ungrouping sheets

Sheets can be grouped (connected) to facilitate creating or formatting two or more identical sheets. For example, you can create one sheet and copy it to two other sheets, or you can group three blank sheets and enter and format the content once-no subsequent copying required.

Entering decimal points automatically

If you need to enter lots of numbers with a fixed number of decimal places, Excel has a useful tool:

How to avoid misleading numbers

Applying a number format to a cell doesn't change the value, but only how the value appears in the worksheet. Formatting can play a joke with you, e.g., sum of values seems incorrect because Excel displays a limited number of decimal places and their sum is not equal to the real sum.

How to insert fractions

This tip describes how to use fractions simply.

Check data entry for invalid entries

You can greatly reduce data-entry problems in your workbooks by making Excel check entries before entering them in specific cells. To do so, you need to define restrictions and data-validation rules for those cells.

Adding and removing page breaks

On printing worksheet you might not be satisfied with the current pagination, so you might need to insert or remove manual page break.

Removing excess spaces and nonprinting characters

Often, data imported into an Excel worksheet contains excess spaces or strange (often unprintable) characters. There are two handy functions TRIM and CLEAN to cleanup such data.