By Sophia | Last Updated
In some cases, you want to copy formatting from one cell or a range to another to make your worksheet awesome. Excel Format Painter is a very convenient and useful tool to copy formatting from a range of cells and paste it somewhere else in the worksheet or other worksheets, whose function can never be overlooked or underestimated. How to use Format Painter in Excel for multiple cells? This tutorial will guide you How to Use Format Painter to Copy Formatting in Excel 2010.
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Using Format Painter in Excel will save you a lot of time in helping you apply the same formatting, such as cell background color, font style and size, font characteristics (bold, italic, and underline), cell borders and many other formatting not mentioned here to multiple cells in worksheet. Now we will talk about how to use Format Painter in excel 2010.
How to use Format Painter in Excel for multiple cells? The formatting can be copied from one cell to another cell or multiple cells with just three simple steps.
Step 1. Select the cell that you want to copy formatting from.
Step 2. Go to Home tab in the ribbon and click Format Painter icon.
Tip: After you click the Format Painter icon in the Clipboard ribbon, you can see that the pointer changes to a paintbrush icon and the selected cell highlighted with a moving border, which indicates that the Format Painter is active and effective.
Step 3. Select a different cell to paste the formatting. Or you can click and drag over a range of cells to paste the formatting to multiple cells.
Tip: Format Painter only copies the formatting not the value in the cell.
After you complete these three steps, you can find that these cells have been formatted to the cell that you selected in Step 1. In this case, the target cells become bold, centrally aligned and get a green background color as cell C7.
Sometimes you need copy the formatting from one cell or even a range of cells and paste it to a non-adjacent range of cells. If you click on the Format Painter icon in the Home tab according to the steps that we mentioned above, it allows you to copy and paste the formatting only once. How to use the Format Painter in Excel 2010 twice or even more times?
Step 1. Double click on the Format Painter icon after you have selected the cells that you want to copy the formatting from.
Tip: This will allow you copy from a range of cells and paste that formatting for multiple times.
Step 2. Choose the cells to paste the formatting to.
Step 3. Press ESC or click on the Format Painter button to disable the Format Painter mode.
Thus, the target cells will have the same formatting with the selected cell. In this case, the target cells become bold, left aligned and get a green background color.
How do you use the Format Painter in Excel 2010 to quickly copy the formatting of the entire column to another column? You can do it according the following guidance.
Step 1. Click the heading of the column whose formatting you want to copy, and go to Format Painter.
Step 2. Go to click the heading of the target column.
Thus, the formatting of the original column is applied to the target column. In this case, the target Column D becomes bold, red and centrally aligned as Column B.
Similarly, you can copy the formatting of the entire row column-by-column to another row. Click the row heading, go to Format Painter, and then click the heading of the target row.
In this case, Row 5 becomes bold, red and left aligned in the manner of Row 3.
You can use shortcut for format painter in Excel 2010 instead of clicking the Format Painter button on the ribbon. Steps as below:
Step 1. Select the range or cell with the formatting you want to copy.
Step 2. Press Alt, H, F, P keys on the keyboards successively rather than simultaneously.
When you press these keys one by one, you can see different letter combinations beside different tabs in the ribbon.
The function of pressing Alt, H, F, P is shown as follows:
Alt: Activates the keyboard shortcuts for ribbon commands.
H: Selects the Home tab.
F and P: Choose the Format Painter button.
Step 3. Click the cell that you want to paste the formatting to.
Now you get the steps to apply the same format to different cells on Excel. Why not go to have a try now?
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