What Is a Cell Style?

A cell style in Excel is a combination of formatting options, including font sizes and color, number formats, cell borders, and shading that you can name and save as part of the worksheet.

Apply a Cell Style

Excel has many built-in cell styles that you can apply as is to a worksheet or modify as desired. These built-in styles can also serve as the basis for custom cell styles you can save and share between workbooks.

Customize Cell Styles

One advantage of using styles is that if you modify any cell style after applying it in a worksheet, all cells using that style automatically update to reflect the changes. Further, you can incorporate Excel’s lock cells feature into cell styles to prevent unauthorized changes to specific cells, worksheets, or workbooks. You can also customize cell styles either from scratch or using a built-in style as a starting point. The new style’s name will now appear at the top of the Cell Styles Gallery under the Custom heading. To apply your style to cells in a worksheet, follow the steps above for using a built-in style.

Copy a Cell Style to Another Workbook

When you create a custom cell style in a workbook, it’s not available across Excel. You can easily copy custom styles to other workbooks, though.

Remove Cell Style Formatting

Finally, you can remove any formatting you apply to a cell without deleting the data or the saved cell style. You can also delete a cell style if you no longer want to use it.

Delete a Style

You can delete any built-in and custom cell styles from the Cell Styles gallery except for Normal, which is the default. When you delete a style, any cell that was using it will lose all associated formatting.