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Excel Basics · Interactive lesson 2 of 12

Formatting

Formatting is how a worksheet stops looking like a wall of numbers and starts looking like something you'd hand to someone else. None of it changes the underlying data — only how it's displayed.

BeginnerInteractive

Screens shown: Excel for Microsoft 365 for Windows. Practice works in any browser.

Written tutorialHow to Format Cells in Excel

Skill check

Try these first:

  • Make a heading bold and give it a fill color.
  • Add borders around a small table.
  • Center text in a cell and turn on Wrap Text for a long label.
  • Widen a column so a value stops showing as #####.

All familiar? Skip ahead to M3 — Numbers & Dates.

Teach

What you're learning

Bold
Ctrl+B — makes headings and totals stand out from ordinary data.
Font size & font
Bigger for titles, consistent throughout — mixing five fonts on one sheet reads as clutter, not style.
Fill color
Shades a cell's background — useful for header rows or flagging a value at a glance.
Borders
Draws lines around cells so a table reads as a table, not a loose grid of numbers.
Alignment
Left for text, right for numbers (Excel does this by default), center for headings.
Wrap Text
Lets a long label break onto multiple lines inside one cell instead of spilling over its neighbor.
Merge & Center
Combines cells into one and centers the content — handy for a title bar, but use it sparingly since it complicates sorting and formulas later.
Row height / column width
Drag a row or column border to resize it — or double-click a column border to auto-fit its widest value.

Where to find it in Excel

Home›Font · Alignment · Cells

Swipe sideways to see the whole window.

  1. 1Formatting lives on the Home tab.
  2. 2Font group: font and size, Bold (Ctrl+B), Borders, Fill Color and Font Color.
  3. 3Wrap Text keeps long text inside the cell on several lines.
  4. 4Merge & Center joins A1:D1 into one cell for the title.
  5. 5Format › Row Height and Column Width set exact sizes.

Rendered view of Excel for Microsoft 365 (Windows). Ribbon layout can differ slightly on Mac, Excel for the web or a narrow window.

Guided practice

"Make this look like something you would send to your manager." Click a cell below to select it, then use the toolbar to format it.

🧾 Weekly Sales — select a cell, then pick a tool
Click "Region Breakdown by Store Location" first — it's the long label that needs Wrap Text most.
Tip: format the header row first — bold, a fill color, maybe centered — and the rest of the table usually needs very little else.

Real-world exercise

Clean up a real handoff

Take any plain, unformatted table you have lying around (or the Weekly Sales table above) and get it ready to send to a manager: bold the headers, add a fill color to the header row, border the whole table, center anything that reads better centered, and wrap any label that's spilling into its neighbor. Resist the urge to color every cell — restraint is part of the skill.

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