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Home › Videos › How to apply bold, italic, underlining styles in Excel

How to apply bold, italic, underlining styles in Excel

Transcript 

In this lesson we'll look at how to apply the basic styles of bold, italic, and underlining. All of these styles can be applied individually or together.

Let's take a look.

Let's pick up where we left off and work with the drink size headings in our sample coffee menu.

Holding down the Control key, we can select all of these headings at once and work with them at the same time.

First, let's left-align the headings and reduce the font size a bit. We can do all of this using the controls on the ribbon.

To bold the headings, just click the bold button on the ribbon. Notice that the bold button is now highlighted. To clear the bold style, just click the button again.

The italic and underline styles work the same way. The first click turns on the style, and the second click turns it off again. You can mix and match bold, italic, and underlining in any combination.

The underline button also contains a menu that lets you apply a double underline. This button is "sticky." If you apply a double underline, the button will use this style again the next time you click it. You can apply a single underline again to reset the button.

If you encounter a situation where cells contain mixed formatting—for example, some cells are bold, some are italic, and some are underlined, but not consistently—it can be a little tricky to clean things up.

It's often easiest to just select all cells and then toggle each button on and off again to "reset" the style back to a common value. Then, you can apply the style you want to the selection, and get a consistent result.

Master Excel with practice. Download this worksheet (and dozens more) in our Core Excel course. Learn by doing.

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Dave Bruns

Hi - I'm Dave Bruns, and I run Exceljet with my wife, Lisa. Our goal is to help you work faster in Excel. We create short videos, and clear examples of formulas, functions, pivot tables, conditional formatting, and charts.

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