Good formatting in Excel

Microsoft has made it very easy to dress up your worksheets with all sorts of fill patterns, borders and other frills. The downside of this, however, is that many users format cells in an ad-hoc manner, creating messy spreadsheets.

Sounds familiar? Luckily, there are solutions to this problem. By bringing consistency to your formatting you automatically improve the quality of your spreadsheets. Not only will it look better, thinking about the purpose of the cells in your model and how to format them accordingly will change your mindset too.

Interview: Good formatting

This interview with Jan Karel Pieterse shows us what true experts think of when they think of formatting in Excel. What is the purpose of formatting in Excel? How do you practically apply principles like, less is more? Watch the video to find out!

B​e consistent, u​se Excel’s styles

Bringing consistency into your formatting forces you to think about the structure of your work. Following strict formatting rules may even force you to reconsider the structure of the entire model. This is a good thing, because it could improve the quality of the computational model itself. Styles are a great way to help you create a good-looking spreadsheet model which is also easy to understand. In general, though, we think consistent formatting is rarely applied well and we believe styles should be a standard exercise in Excel use.

We cannot emphasize this enough: consistent, good formatting plays a huge role in improving maintainability and transfer-ability of spreadsheets! Always keep the future user in mind and make the spreadsheet understandable for them. Formatting is just one part of this process and there is no single correct way to do this in Excel. It is simply important to be consistent, and to make your work understandable for others.