Use Cell Styles to Make your Spreadsheet Models User-friendly [Quick Tip]

Posted on October 1st, 2009 in Excel Howtos , Learn Excel - 6 comments

Spreadsheet modeling or scenario modeling is one of the common uses of Microsoft Excel. People, especially in financial sector use MS Excel to do a lot of modeling. While excel has such powerful features like goal seek and scenarios, it also has a very useful feature called “cell styles” that you can exploit to make your spreadsheet models more user friendly.

Here is a small screencast to get you started. Excel 2007 comes with some great styles to mark various types of cells in the model, viz, input, output, calculation, warning, explanation etc.

Howto use cell styles to make your spreadsheet models user-friendly

What is your experience with cell styles?

I think they are easy to use and add consistent (and professional) look to the workbooks. What do you think?

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Tags: cell styles, custom cell formatting, excel 2007, Learn Excel, microsoft, modeling, quick tip, ribbon, screencasts, spreadsheets, using excel

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Pingback by How to Make Better Excel Spreadsheets - 10 Tips to Make Excel Files User-friendly | Pointy Haired Dilbert: Charting & Excel Tips - Chandoo.org on November 3, 2009 @ 9:25 am

Pingback by How to Make Better Excel Spreadsheets - 10 Tips to Make Excel Files User-friendly | Pointy Haired Dilbert: Charting & Excel Tips - Chandoo.org on November 3, 2009 @ 9:25 am

Comments

Hui... October 1, 2009

I think it’s great that M$ removed the 400 style limitations that existed upto Excel 2003.
Not that anybody deliberately tried to break it, but it was a pain to fix once breached.

sam October 4, 2009

I recently came across a file with a style that begins with =C:\Windows\…
I tried to delete is manually, via VBA etc but no luck.
I finally found a way..by going in to the XML part of the file and deleting it there.

Chandoo October 6, 2009

@Hui… I didnt know there was a 400 style limitation in 2003. Good that you pointed it out.

@Sam… hmm, styles and hardcoded worksheet references can be a pain in the a$$. I once spent 2 hours finding a reference that was pointing to another workbook on another computer.

Nimesh March 2, 2010

This was present in 2003 as well, but has been enhanced in newer versions.
I never used this in 2003

Is this present as default in 2007 ribbons?
I saw in 2007 but did not see as default in 2010, and was wondering were has it gone.

Thanks to this post for highlighting it

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