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Microsoft Excel 2016 Bootcamp - Zero to Hero Training

Borders & lines

Daniel Walter Scott || VIDEO: 1 of 24

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Hello, wonderful Excel learners. In this video we're going to look at adding borders around cells, like up the top here where we got some shading, some lines around the outside. We're going to use pre-made styles. We're going to make our own for the bottom here, plus this little total, lurking lines that go around the outside. Let's go and do that now. It's really easy, let's go and do it.

First up, let's put our description, and amount headings in. First of all what we want to do is, I'm going to make it 2-columns. So there's going to be one for the ‘Description’, one for the ‘Amount’. You might have another one that might be ‘Discounts’, it's up to you.

First of all I'm going to merge these guys. So, I've selected all the ones I want to select. And up the top, under 'Home', there's this option that says 'Merge & Center'. That's going to work perfect for us. So we'll merge all the cells. And the text inside is going to be centered.

So, 'Description’, and this one here is going to be 'Amount'. And what I'll do is, I will move this to the middle as well by going up to here. I might have to click off and click back in. And up here is 'Center'. I'm going to make them 'Bold' as well. Click on 'B' for bold, or 'Control B', nice and bold.

Next thing I want to do is I want to style the lines around the outside. So, with them both selected, I click, and drag across these two. You've got some pre-made styles, so if you're under 'Home' tab, along here, under 'Styles', click this little arrow here, the bottom one. Gives you a bunch more. If you hover about him, can you see, in my document there-- actually it's updating. So just find something that works, there's no exact rule. And this one here that says 'Output', looks very boring and traditionally the tops of heading, so I'm going to use that one. Perfect.

Next thing I want to do is, I want to make a nice big box for all the different description options. And I just want a line around the outside, so I'm going to select a big chunk. Now, for us, because there's nothing really that goes underneath we're going to select a big chunk of this. It's easy to add rows. We're going to do that a little later on but you might as well make this nice and big here, just in case we get a quote with blocks in here. So to select this, just one of the lines around the outside-- actually I want the line around this bit. So I want a line around this bit first. And what we do is-- I don't want any of these styles, I want to just manually do it. You can do it by hovering above, dropping this little menu here down. It says 'Borders', it's just underneath the 'Font' there. You’ll have to look at the little icons here, the one I want is the 'Outside Border'. So it's just going to put a line around the outside.

Now, how do you know there's a line around the outside? There's gray lines, there's black lines, it's hard to know. So what we're going to do is, we're going to turn off these things called 'Grid Lines'. So we're going up here, under 'Home', actually it's under 'View'. And there's one here that says 'Grid Lines'. So 'Grid Lines', if you turn them off-- grid lines are only there as a helpful use to you while you're working.

When you print this, those grid lines don't appear. It doesn't really matter if you have them on or off, they won't print, but it's just helpful if you're doing lines around the outside. Makes life a little bit easier. Back to 'Home'. Same around 'Amount', select this guy, can you see, it's defaulted to the last one I used. I can just click on this rather than having to go to the drop down now. Perfect.

There's a couple of other things I want to do. First of all, I want-- there's going to be here, a 'Subtotal'. And there's going to be 'Tax', and then there's going to be a 'Total'. I'm going to make this 'Total' bold

because it's the most important one. I'm going to make them all right aligned, so I've selected them all.

Up here, I'm going to click 'Right Align', and in here is going to be my 'Subtotal', 'Tax', and the 'Total' here is going to have a slightly different line around the outside. It's really common to have this.

Under 'Styling' here, drop this down, I want this one here that says 'Total'. One line at the top, two at the bottom. It's our 'Total'. So those are some of the styles to get the lines around the outside.

One of the things we will have to do before we move on is, I'm going to turn grid lines back on, just so you can see. You'll see in here, there's actually lots of different columns. I want to join all these. So I click, go through, select them all. Go to 'Home', 'Merge'. Probably not 'Merge & Center' because it will center the text, I want it to be left aligned. I can go to 'Merge Cells'. I can keep doing that over and over again. I'll try and select them all, and try do it all in one big go, just make it one giant box. Bad.

So we're going to look at this other merge technique. And what it means is, I'm going to select all of these. And there's one in here that says 'Merge Across'. So it's going to merge everything along the rows, but not the columns. So that becomes really handy, you can see there. It's exactly what I wanted, all these little lines. This one here is already perfect, and that's going to be it for our borders.

Let's get on to the next one where we start adding our totals and start calculating them for our quote.

All right, see you in the next video.