Style Add-ins

I’m trying to make good on one of my New Year’s resolutions. Namely, to stop using so many cell formats and start using more styles. Generally, I’m happy using the styles because I find myself needing the exact same format over-and-over. Or I’ll find that I need to change a certain format and can do it all in one shot. Nice.

I absolutely hate the dialog in Excel, though. It doesn’t fit well with my keyboard-centric dogma. Like any good Excel user, I thought about writing my own style managing utility. But I’ve been burned before. I’d spend a lot of time putting one together, post it here, and the first comment would be “Oh, I have one already and it’s way better than yours.”. And it would be.

This time I thought it would be prudent to see if there’s anything good out there before I set out to write my own. If you use styles and have a utility that makes it easier, leave a comment. Thanks.

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5 thoughts on “Style Add-ins

  1. I’ve got a similar sort of thing. Certainly not the add-in you’re asking about.

    What I do is drop Helper.XLA into my XLSTART folder. This add-in creates a toolbar with a dropdown list of formatting tasks.
    Helper.XLA is a custom add-in.

    So I’ve got one called: Worksheet as List:
    Public Sub Format_ActiveSheet_As_List()
    With ActiveWindow
    If Not ActiveSheet Is Nothing Then
    .Zoom = 80
    .SplitRow = 1
    .FreezePanes = True
    With .ActiveSheet
    .Rows(1).Font.Bold = True
    .Cells.EntireColumn.AutoFit
    .Cells(1).Select
    End With
    End If
    End With
    End Sub

    and another for formatting a column as a date:
    Public Sub Format_Selected_Column_As_Date()
    If TypeName(Selection) = “Range” Then Selection.EntireColumn.NumberFormat = “dd-mmm-yyyy hh:mm:ss”
    End Sub

    The beauty of this approach is that I can do other startup tasks too:
    such as making the name box wider:

  2. I don’t use styles for my cell formatting needs. I prefer to keep (wherevever possible) to some standard color format schemes along with a consistent approach to number formats.

    To this end, in my Personal.xls, I have designed my own user form that I then use to allow me to quickly apply my preferred formats to selected cells.

    I would be more than happy to let you see it.

  3. Dick,

    I have never really looked into using styles in Excel and I started to work on my utility so I have just stayed on that path.

    How can I send you a copy?


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