From the course: Excel Essential Training (Microsoft 365)

Color backgrounds

From the course: Excel Essential Training (Microsoft 365)

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Color backgrounds

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- [Narrator] On this worksheet, we're seeing two examples of color backgrounds and also we might want to apply borders here as well. Both of those features are found on the Home tab in the Font group, although they don't specifically relate to fonts. So I've got a blue background here, that's just fine, although, I might want to explore a little bit. The Fill Color bucket, sometimes we call it the bucket, even though we don't see that term there, has a drop arrow. And we see some choices here, and we can certainly go down this path. Keep in mind, that with text, dark backgrounds, unless you've got a white text entry here, don't work so well. And down here, we've got yellow cells here too. All the more important. We don't want to be using dark colors here. But again, however you are using the colors, simply to make the data stand out, provide a little bit of color, maybe pizazz is too strong of a word here. We just want to enliven the appearance here. Sometimes a sea of numbers, as these are sometimes called, just overwhelm the audience and make it a little bit more boring than it really needs to be. So we can use these pretty much at our own will. And when you're choosing these colors, by the way, by using the drop arrow here on that Fill Color bucket, if you're unhappy with these, you might see some standard colors. We don't see yellow up there, but we see it down here. But if this still isn't enough, you can choose more colors. And on the Standard tab here, here are 127 different choices, and you can click on this one and that one. You don't get a preview in the background, but if I want to use light blue here, I'll click Okay and see if I like that or not. And there it is. So you can certainly waste some time here, but you might develop some favorites once you have used that for a while at least when you go to other cells to highlight them and you click that same arrow to the right of the bucket, you'll see those under Recent Colors. Also, at certain points you'll say, I don't want color here. Highlight these. We come back to that same choice. Click the drop arrow and choose, No Fill. Now, sometimes a border's more appropriate than colors. Not as obvious perhaps, but we might want to put a border around these. These are the only pure numbers in this worksheet. All the others are formulas. So let's put a border around them. So on the Home tab, in that same Font group, here's a drop arrow for Borders, and lots of choices. Maybe just a thick outside border. Is that good enough? When you apply border features, often you can't tell whether it's happened until you click outside the highlighted area. So that's what that border's looking like. And just to experiment a little bit, I'm going to put a border around here, but maybe a different one. We could go back to that drop arrow, consider some of these options. If none of those quite appeals to us, we could go all the way to the bottom and choose, More Borders. And then again, and a potential time waster here, choose a different border style. There's one there. Different color along the way. Make that be red possibly. And then consider using it as an outline only. Or, on an inside, as well as outline. And tons of options, some of which probably are not too widely used, like the diagonals. So click Okay, and maybe we've done that. I think you realize we're approaching the aspect of overkill or overusing a feature just for effect. But these are easy to get to. Border features, found here, within the Font group. And then just to the right of that, color backgrounds widely used in Excel to make data stand out.

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