Explore formatting options not available on the Home tab

- [Instructor] Excel has numerous formatting options available on the the Home tab but not everything is there. And sometimes you need to get to features that you just can't find. Let's say we wanna format these phone numbers, I'm going to right-click column E. This is one of three major ways we can get to other features that we don't see on the Home tab. As I right-click column E, we wanna go to Format Cells. And if you've never seen the feature you wouldn't exactly know where to look, but we are looking at the Number tab.

Don't count on the correct tab always being selected here for you, sometimes, you'll have to click the appropriate tab. Here says Number, and the reason is, that the last time I used this feature, I did use this particular tab. What are we looking for here? It's a special category for phone numbers, you can double-click it, or having clicked it, click OK. Now I wanna make a formatting change possibly elsewhere. Another way to get there, and it isn't always related to just information in the column, it could be in a row.

Tom Marquez here on row 4 is left, I don't know if there's a keystroke shortcut for strikethrough but I wanna use that. So I'm going to click row 4, and then another way to get to Format Cells is Control + 1, the keystroke shortcut Control + 1. Now didn't activate the particular tab that I'm interested in but I can certainly get to it quickly. It's a font type choice, and there we see some choices and there's Strikethrough right there. By the way, there is a keystroke shortcut, it's Control + 5, but you don't always know that but that's one way to get to those features.

So, either by pressing Control + 1, as we saw previously, we can right-click on the selected data and get in to Format Cells that way too. And there's a third way, perhaps not as obvious and sometimes useful. I'm about to change the way the salaries are displayed here. Maybe you want dollars and cents to be displayed. So, I've selected column J, and I'm not sure whether I wanna use some of the features here that are available on the Home tab, but in the lower right hand corner of the Number group is a tiny little arrow.

And notice that you'll also see these over here for the Alignment group, and the Font group over here. Microsoft refers to these as dialog box launchers, almost nobody uses that phrase but I'm gonna click the button right here. Column J selected, I click this arrow, and maybe I'll explore some of the number formats, or possibly some of the features that are not available on the Home tab at all. How about Fill? No, I probably wouldn't use these colors here, but maybe I want Fill Effects here, some of these, or Patterns possibly, some options there too.

In other words, we can get into some of these other features but I probably wouldn't really use this one, but we see what's happening there that gives it certain amount of visual flare maybe. But the way we get to these features is either by after selecting the data, we press Control + 1, or we use that little button called the dialog box launcher, or we simply right-click as we make the selection and at the same time, choose Format Cells. So maybe we wanna change the color of column D. Right-click column D, go to Format Cells, and then make the appropriate choices.

Notice again, when we're in this dialog box, there's a tab for number, and alignment, and font. And what do we see up in the actual menu system up above? There's Number, Alignment, and Font, and of course some other choices. Here's one for Border. And we can get to this in a couple of ways too. I'm gonna switch to a different worksheet here at the bottom, Profits here. I wanna border around just these cells here. There are two ways to get to this quickly. One is by way of the actual Border button, then we can go down to the bottom, and choose More Borders, and get to the dialog box this way, and the Border tab.

Another way is, we've got our data highlighted, and we can use any of those other techniques we mentioned earlier. Either Control + 1 or right-click, Format Cells, I'll use Control + 1 this time. And there's the Border tab. Now it's active here because I just used it, but in certain cases, of course, you will have to select the Border tab yourself to get to these features. So we've seen a number of different ways to get to the formatting features that are not on the Home tab and yet we need to use them from time to time.