UIS Tip of the Week: Copy Formatting Quickly with the Format Painter

Say you've written a report in Microsoft Excel. You like the look, especially your headings, which you spent a lot of time to appear just right.

Well, 15 minutes before you're supposed to present the report to your team, your manager asks you to add four new sections to the report. You wish you hadn't chosen such complicated formatting for your headings, since you now have to apply it to all the new ones.

Using Format Painter saves you that time and duplicated effort. Instead of having to manually apply the formatting to each new section heading, you can quickly copy all of the formatting attributes by using one toolbar button.

To copy the formatting, do the following:

1. Select the cell that contains the formatting you want to copy.
2. Click on the Copy Format button (the one that's the small paintbrush).
   
   Note : If you want to apply the formatting to more than one cell, double-click on the Copy Format button.

   

   You'll see a paintbrush icon as part of the cursor.

   

3. Select the cell(s) whose formatting you want to be the same as the formatted cell you selected.
   
   To apply the formatting to more than one cell, click on each cell to which you want to apply the formatting.

   

   You may immediately see some of the formatting reflected in the cells you selected, as shown here.

   

4. Begin typing to see any text formatting reflected in the new cell.

   

5. Click the Esc key when you?re finished.