Applying Borders and Shading

Applying Borders & Shading

Borders and Shading are two of the simplest, most effective types of formatting you can apply to your worksheets. The goal in using them is to clarify the structure of your worksheet data – to draw attention to section, column, and row titles and important numbers that will help someone using the sheet find the most relevant data right away.

On this worksheet, note that shading and borders have already been applied, and their use separates sections as well as separating the titles and totals from the column headings within each section.

The borders and shading also clearly define the data that’s been Totaled by person, by quarter, and then by division. This helps someone using the worksheet – whether they’re just looking something up or are planning to edit the data in it – to see exactly what goes where and how all the data works together.

Now, on this version of the worksheet, no shading or borders are in place.

The titles and totals have been bolded, but it’s still hard to see where one section ends and the next begins. In other videos, we show you the methods used to bold and enlarge the font in certain cells, and we also demonstrate how to merge and center the main report title in Row 2. For this video, we’ll focus only on borders and shading, so you can see their direct impact.

First, let’s delineate our sections with borders. I like to use the Thick Outside Border for this, as it’s a fast way to literally place related info all into a single box.

We access it from the Borders button, found in the Font section of the Home tab. I’ll click the drop arrow to the right of the button to see all my border choices.

I had selected the Sales Rep Section first, and by choosing Thick Outside Border, that’s the border that was applied. Note that once I select a border type, that becomes the effect applied by clicking the Border button itself. To access other options, I’ll need to click the drop arrow again.

Next, the Quarterly Totals Section, and then Projections and Commissions. Now all 4 sections have been separated into their own boxes.

Last, I’ll select the Division Totals section and put a thick box border around those cells, too.

Next, bottom borders under the column headings and Thick Box Borders on the section titles will help define the data within each section.

Last, when it comes to borders, I’ll apply a top border to the cells in Row 16, to separate the last sales rep’s sales total, projection, difference, and commission from the total calculations for each of those columns. I’ll do this again in the Division Totals section to delineate the totals in row 23.

Now, with those sections and the sections within them clearly defined, I’ll apply shading to the section titles – the cells they’re in and their adjacent cells, too. This requires the Fill Color button, also found in the Font section of the ribbon, and I can make a choice from the palette displayed.

And then I’ll apply shading to the column and row headings.

And last, shading can be applied to the totals in rows 16 and 23, and the totals in Columns I and N.

Note, you can use the basic palette of colors offered by the Fill Color button, or from that button’s menu, choose More Colors and make a choice from lots of colors on the Standard and Custom tabs. The Custom tab offers a place to enter RGB and hexadecimal numbers, if your worksheet must adhere to very specific color requirements.

So, now with all of my formatting in place, this worksheet shows that I care about how it looks and that I wanted to make finding important information quick and easy. And it was quick and easy to do that!