In Excel, if you want to copy the format of a group of cells into another, you can use the Copy command and then make a Paste and selecting, on the Paste Options, the Formatting one. This is how most people do. But Excel has a function, called Format Painter, designed for this task. Let’s see an example. We have this table of data on our worksheet:
It' has some font style, color, size and borders applied. Now we make a new table for the 2nd Quarter Sales, like this:
We want to apply the same format to this table that we had for the 1st Quarter Sales one. Select the complete table (in this case cells B2:C6) and on your Home tab, on your Clipboard group, click on the Format Painter button. You will see your cursor change to a plus and a brush icon.
Now click on your B8 cell so that Excel applies the formatting from cells B2:C6 on this new table. This will be the result:
If you have more than one place where you want to copy the formatting, instead of clicking once on the Format Painter button, click it twice. On this example, we want to copy the formatting from cells B2:C6 into the table starting on cells B8 and B14.
So, select the cells B2:C6, click twice on the Format Painter button and click once on each cell (B8 and B14) so that Excel applies the formatting to this two tables. When you finish, just click ESC key to close the Format Painter copy. The result will be this:
This is just another example on how you can improve your Excel productivity using tools that are already available to help you.