13th May 2002

What's the best part of a doughnut? Some would say the sprinkles, but I was always partial to the 'filling.' Before your eyes glaze over, let's dive right into another tasty Excel tip. Right-click a cell and select the 'Format Cells' option. Flip over to the Alignment tab and select 'Fill' from the 'Horizontal' menu. Click the OK button. What happened? You'll find out in a second. Go ahead and enter a single character into that cell you just formatted and tap ENTER. Make the column width as long or short as you wish, the area will always be flooded with that character. Use a symbol, letter, number... whatever. Now, I believe we have time for another trick. Let's say you want to select all cells which contain a certain type of data. Press CTRL+G and click the 'Special' button. If you want to format all the numbers-only cells, select 'Constants' and remove checkmarks from all but the 'Numbers' option. Once this is done, you'll be whisked back to the main document - with all the appropriate cells highlighted. From here, you can format them at will.