Format Painter And Other Ways To Copy Formatting In Excel - Ablebits

Excel Format Painter

When it comes to copying formatting in Excel, Format Painter is one of the most helpful and underused features. It works by copying the formatting of one cell and applying it to other cells.

With just a couple of clicks, it can help you reproduce most, if not all of the formatting settings, including:

• Number format (General, Percentage, Currency, etc.)
• Font face, size, and color
• Font characteristics such as bold, italic, and underline
• Fill color (cell background color)
• Text alignment, direction and orientation
• Cell borders

In all Excel versions, the Format Painter button is located on the Home tab, in the Clipboard group, right next to the Paste button:

How to use Format Painter in Excel

To copy cell formatting with the Excel Format Painter, just do the following:

1. Select the cell with the formatting you want to copy.
2. On the Home tab, in the Clipboard group, click the Format Painter button. The pointer will change to a paint brush.
3. Move to the cell where you want to apply the formatting and click on it.

Done! The new formatting is copied to your target cell.

Excel Format Painter tips

If you need to change formatting of more than one cell, clicking each cell individually would be tedious and time consuming. The following tips will speed things up.

1. How to copy formatting to a range of cells.

To copy formatting to several adjacent cells, select the sample cell with the desired format, click the Format Painter button, and then drag the brush cursor across the cells that you want to format.

2. How to copy format to non-adjacent cells.

To copy formatting to non-contiguous cells, double-click the Format Painter button instead of single-clicking it. This will "lock" the Excel Format Painter on, and the copied formatting will be applied to all cells and ranges that you click/select until you press Esc or click on the Format Painter button one final time.

3. How to copy the formatting of one column to another column row-by-row

To quickly copy the format of the entire column, select the heading of the column whose formatting you want to copy, click Format Painter, and then click the heading of the target column.

As demonstrated in the following screenshot, the new formatting is applied to the target column row-by-row, including the column width:

In a similar manner, you can copy the format of the entire row, column-by-column. For this, click the sample row heading, click Format Painter, and then click the heading of the target row.

As you have just seen, the Format Painter makes copying format as easy as it can possibly be. However, as is often the case with Microsoft Excel, there is more than one way to do the same thing. Below, you will find two more methods to copy formats in Excel.