Styles

A style is a group of commands that change the appearance of the cells in your worksheet.
A style lets you apply a name to a combination of formatting attributes and are workbook specific.
You can use styles to help your worksheets and workbooks contain consistent formatting.
If you consistently apply specific formatting options you can create a named style so that you can apply this style quickly.
These attributes can then be quickly applied by selecting the name of the style from a list.
Styles are useful when you want all the headings in your workbook to look the same. If you change the style of one, then they will all change.

It is very easy to mistake the styles for something else though, either number formats or table styles.

Styles are not suitable for ranges of cells with different outline borders.

Advantages of using Styles

Styles can save you a lot of time when you need to apply the same format to different parts of your worksheet.
The advantage of using styles is that you can apply more than one formatting enhancement to a range of cells in one go.
One advantage is that you can update them easily at a later date.
Styles are not suitable for ranges of cells with different outline borders.

Built-in Styles

Every new workbook contains 6 built-in pre-defined styles
Comma - Two decimal places and a thousand separator (number formatting only)
Comma [0] - Same as above, rounded to the nearest integer
Currency - Currency format with two decimal places, thousand separator and currency sign (number format attribute only).
Currency [0] - Same as above, rounded to the nearest integer
Normal - Includes defaults for all formatting attributes
Percent - Percentage format with no decimal places (number formatting attribute only).
Note: If your workbook contains hyperlinks, then there may be extra styles "Hyperlink" and "Hyperlink Active"

In Styles there is an option to specify a style for the text after your style (example in the case of a caption with a (1x1) table below it

Default Style

The default style is called "Normal" and this is used for both text and numbers and is also used to determine the font used for the row and column headings.
This can be changed from the Options. The default font is Arial, 10
For existing workbooks it can be changed from the (Format > Style > Normal > Modify) dialog box.

Any changes you make to the default font will not take affect untill Excel is closed and reopened.
Changing the Normal style of a workbook will only affect the font in that particular workbook.

Modifying Styles

Click Modify to modify the currently selected style

Style Drop-Down List

In Excel 2003 accessing your styles was not particularly easy or convenient.
If you use styles a lot you might want to consider adding the "Default Style" button to one of your toolbars ??
If you are using a lot of styles in your workbook, then it may be worth adding the Style drop-down list to the Formatting toolbar.
For more details on this see the Customising your Toolbars and Menus section [Link]. This will also enable to create a new style by selecting the cell and typing the new name directly into the drop-down box.
SS - added to formatting toolbar.

Important

All the pre-defined styles except Normal only have a number attribute defined.
You can quickly change the formatting attributes of all the cells within a workbook by changing any of the "Normal" attributes.
Try to keep your style names short and use names that describe how the style is used and not the attributes.
It is always a good idea to remove any unwanted styles.
The standard Excel font and size is Arial 10. I personally would not change this. If you copy data (i.e. charts or objects) between workbooks that have different fonts and sizes it will create problems !!
You cant change a style in any worksheets in a workbook that is protected.