Excel Formatting Tips for Experienced Professionals
For those outside the professional world, Excel really isn't relevant. For some people in the professional world Excel is an unfortunate part of life that needs to be tolerated. For financial professionals, Excel is a way of life, and we embrace it! Excel is simultaneously a tool and a means of communication of critical financial information and understanding how to format your spreadsheets is essential for higher level performance. Today, I'm going to share with you three uncommon Excel formatting tips to take your spreadsheets to the next level!
#1 - Default Cells Styles
Any experienced Excel user can tell you that it's important to label your spreadsheets so people can read them. Most commonly, people like to label cells that are inputs and calculations so that the next person using the spreadsheet doesn't mess anything up. In my many years, I've seen many different ways that people make these distinctions. But did you know that Excel has Default styles for these built into it's baseline functionality? On the Home tab in the Styles section, you can see cell styles for common user needs such as calculation cells, input cells, check cells, note cells and more! I love using these Styles because they are so accessible to everyone and can be universally understood as long as the other person is using Excel. Try them out yourself!
#2 - Text Formatting - Center Across Selection and Merging Cells
Over my many years of staring at spreadsheets in various roles, I have learned that people do not consistently format titles, notes, and commentary within a spreadsheet. Smart Excel users understand that different features need to be used in different circumstances. Here are two commonly used and misunderstood ways to format some longer text in Excel spreadsheet:
Merging Cells - merging cells allows a user to put their text wherever they want in a contiguous space within the spreadsheet. This feature is great for creating notes away from data with a clean presentation in mind. This clean presentation comes with a drawback - Merged cells do not play nicely with the data analysis features of Excel such as sorting and filtering.
Center Across Selection - The ultimate solution to the issues with merging cells…with one exception. By using the center across selection format in Excel, you can get a clean looking format for text within or close to a dataset without actually merging the cells. The main drawback of formatting text this way is that it cannot be done vertically with text wrapping. Because of this limitation, longer notes are better off as merged cells as opposed to centered text.
If you don’t prefer either of these options, you can confuse everyone you work with by putting in a text box into the spreadsheet! I’ve seen it work out well sometimes, but usually it doesn’t so be careful!
#3 - Snapping Charts to Grid
Excel users love data. A special set of those users love data visualization with charts and graphs. To make those graphs look clean in your workbooks, you need to make sure they are lined up with the grid of your spreadsheet. To do this, hold down the ALT key while dragging the corners of the chart, and you will be able to line everything up perfectly! This last tip is a small one, but it makes a big difference to those who use charts often!
When it comes to using Excel as a finance professional, there is always more to learn! Taking the time to learn these seemingly minor features can make a big difference in how you do your work and how your spreadsheets look to others. If you didn’t know about these already, give them a try!