Formatting

Formatting Text

Spreadsheets can be pretty dry, so we need some tools to dress them up a little. We can use most of the tricks in our word processor to do the formatting of text. We can use : bold face, italics, underline, change the color, align (left, right, center), font size, font, etc.

We need to select the cell (or group of cells) that we wish to change the formatting and then go from the FORMAT menu -- down to CELLS -- click on FONT. Here is a picture of what you will see there. Notice that you can choose to change the alignment as well as several other options.

Formatting Numbers

We often need to format the numbers to display the appropriate number of decimals, dollar signs, percentage, red (for negative dollars), etc. It is best to keep numbers describing similar items as uniform as possible.
If we have the number 3.53262624672423, we would probably have to make the column wider and at the least bore most people. We need to set the number of decimal places to what is important. If this was a dollar figure that had calculated tax it should be $3.53.

Here is a screen displaying what you would see if you select a cell (or group of cells) and from the FORMAT menu -- go down to format -- click on number.

Column Width

A question that everyone (who has ever worked on a spreadsheet) has asked at one time or another is, "Where did all my numbers go?" or same question, "Where did all of those ####### come from and why are they in my spreadsheet?"
The problem is the number trying to be displayed in a particular cell does not have enough width to display properly. To clear up the problem we just need to make the column wider. You can do this many ways.

Here are two ways to change the column width

1. Select the column (or columns) with the problem by clicking on their labels (letters). Then you choose the MENU FORMAT. Go down to COLUMN and over to WIDTH and type in a new number for the column width.

2. Move the arrow to the right side of the column label and click and drag the mouse to the right (to make wider) or left (to make smaller). Let up on the mouse button when the column is wide enough.

   Notice the cursor changes to a vertical line with arrows pointing left and right.
   

In many spreadsheets you can also change the vertical height of a row by moving the lower edge of the row title (number).