Personalizing

Worksheets – Excel 2016

Personalizing Worksheets
This guide will teach you how to use the following Excel features to personalise worksheets:
1. Cell Styles
2. Excel Themes
3. Inserting Backgrounds

Cell Styles
• A cell style is a set of formatting attributes that allows you to apply multiple formatting
changes in a single step!
• Examples of formatting attributes: fonts & font sizes, number formats, cell borders & shading
• Cell styles are used to ensure that formatting is consistent.
• Especially useful for formatting title and header cells.

Applying cell styles
1. Select the cells you want to style.
In this example, we will select the cell range A1:E2.

2. On the Home tab under the Styles group, click on Cell Styles.

3. Choose a cell style from the drop-down menu. Excel has a selection of pre-installed
themed cell styles, named Accents, and allows you to specify a colour percentage.

Let’s try out Accent 1!

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Personalizing Worksheets – Excel 2016

Doesn’t our sheet look better already?

Excel Themes
Excel themes allow us to change the overall look of worksheets in a workbook.
• Each theme adopts a unique set of colours, fonts and effects.
• Ensures consistency across sheets.
• Quick way to personalise your worksheet, rather than manually changing the individual
attributes of certain parts of your worksheets.
• The default theme in Excel is the Office Theme.

Changing Excel Themes
1. To change your theme, go to Page Layout and click on Themes.
2. Mouseover a theme’s thumbnail to instantly preview it on your current worksheet.

3. Select the theme you want. Let’s select the Gallery theme.

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Personalizing Worksheets – Excel 2016

4. You can also customize your own theme by selecting a theme and modifying it using the
Colours, Fonts and Effects commands. You can then save the theme to Excel by clicking “Save
Current Theme” at the bottom of the Theme dropdown menu.

*Mini-Challenge*

Download the mini-challenge and try creating your own customized theme.
When you are done, click on ‘Save Current Theme…’ in the Themes drop-down menu if you want Excel to
save it for you to use in the future!



Setting a customized theme as the default Excel theme
If you want to save the theme you have created as the new default theme for Excel, follow the steps
below:
1. Save your customize theme.
2. Select File à Options.
3. Go to General à Start up options.
4. Untick ‘Show the Start screen when this application starts’.
5. Click ‘OK’.

Now, when you restart Excel, a new workbook will open using your customised theme and with the
name Book.xtlx.

Inserting Sheet Backgrounds

• Sheets can also be zd by adding background images.
• This is helpful when companies want to include a logo or watermark.

Inserting a background image

1. Under the Page Layout tab select Background.

2. Select an image file to be inserted as the worksheet background.
3. You can insert an image from a file on your computer, find an image online using a search
engine, or select an image from your OneDrive storage.
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Personalizing Worksheets – Excel 2016

*Mini-Challenge*
Download the Food2Go logo and insert it as a sheet background in a new Excel workbook.

Your sheet should look like this:

Removing a Sheet Background
When your worksheet contains a background, the Background icon in ribbon under Page Layout will
change to Delete Background. Click on it to remove the background.

Sheet backgrounds are for display purposes only and will not appear when printed.

After adding a background, you may have to adjust the formatting of cells so they show up well.

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