Using Borders and Fill Colour in your spreadsheets to make them stand out
This week’s hint and tip is about using borders and fill colour in your spreadsheets. This is a section in our Basic Excel training course and both can be used effectively to make your spreadsheets stand out. Both borders and fill colour can be very powerful tools in the Excel package. They can be used for just general improvement of a spreadsheet or to make information stand out. We will now look at both of these options and how you can use them in your spreadsheets.
Borders
Firstly, Borders. A lot of people think that borders are already visible in an Excel spreadsheet however these are borders, they are gridlines!
Gridlines are the grey lines that can be seen around all the cells in your worksheet. These are always here and can be seen as more of a ‘guide’ to show you where one cell ends and another starts.
Borders are different to these. Borders go on top of these gridlines and can be a variety of styles, thicknesses and colours. They are used for making your data stand out a bit more and also for making large amounts of data easier to read.
Fill Colour
Then, Fill Colour. This is also sometimes known as ‘shading’ in other Microsoft Office packages. This is the option where you can fill in the colour of a cell to a specific colour.
A common mistake that people can make is assume that all cells are automatically filled white however they are actually ‘filled’ with no fill. So if you select white as a fill colour it will appear that your gridlines have disappeared!
To solve this issue, just change it to no fill and the gridlines will appear again. Fill colour is used for when you want to highlight a particular cell to bring it to someone’s attention or if you just wanted to add a bit of colour to your spreadsheets.
The video below shows you how to use both borders and fill colour in your spreadsheets.
Watch the video to find out more and then try it out on your own computer!
We hope you have enjoyed this hint and tip, why not take a look at our previous one on Text Manipulation in Excel?
We carry out Excel training Gloucester as well as other cities around the UK and both of these features are found on our Basic Excel course!
If you are interested in Excel training Gloucester or Excel training near you, then please do get in touch!