Microsoft Office

Worksheet Formatting 7
Updating Old Fonts
Office 2007 includes several new fonts, and the default font has been changed for all the Office applications.
In the past, Excel’s default font was 10-point Arial. In Excel 2007, the default font for the Office
theme is 11-point Calibri. Most people will agree that Calibri is much easier to read, and it gives the worksheet
a more modern appearance.
If you use Excel 2007 to open a workbook created in a previous version, the default font will not be changed,
even if you apply a document style (by choosing Page Layout ➪ Themes ➪ Themes). But here’s an easy way
to update the fonts in a workbook that was created using an older version of Excel:
1. Press Ctrl+N to open a new, empty workbook. The new workbook will use the default document
theme.
2. Open your old workbook file.
3. Choose Home ➪ Styles ➪ Cell Styles ➪ Merge Styles. Excel displays its Merge Styles dialog box.
4. In the Merge Styles dialog box, select the new workbook that you created in Step 1.
5. Click OK.
6. Click Yes in response to Excel’s question regarding merging styles that have the same name.
This technique changes the font and size for all unformatted cells. If you’ve applied font formatting to some
cells (for example, made them bold), the font for those cells will not be changed (but you can change the font
manually). If you don’t like the new look of your workbook, just close the workbook without saving the
changes.
TIP
If you plan to distribute a workbook to other users, you should stick with the standard fonts
that are included with Windows or Microsoft Office. If you open a workbook and your system
doesn’t have the font with which the workbook was created, Windows attempts to use a similar font.
Sometimes this attempt works OK, and sometimes it doesn’t.
Use the Font and Font Size tools in the Home tab of the Ribbon (or in the Mini toolbar) to change the font
or size for selected cells.
You also can use the Font tab in the Format Cells dialog box to choose fonts, as shown in Figure 7.3. This
tab enables you to control several other font attributes that aren’t available elsewhere. Besides choosing the
font, you can change the font style (bold, italic), underlining, color, and effects (strikethrough, superscript,
or subscript). If you click the check box labeled Normal Font, Excel displays the selections for the font
defined for the Normal style. I discuss styles later in this chapter. See “Using Named Styles for Easier
Formatting.”
Figure 7.4 shows several different examples of font formatting. In this figure, the gridlines were turned off
to make seeing the underlining easier. Notice, in the figure, that Excel provides four different underlining
styles. In the two non-accounting underline styles, only the cell contents are underlined. In the two
accounting underline styles, the entire width of the cells is always underlined.
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