Having come late to spreadsheets in my computer interactions, I much prefer to adjust column widths and use the Alignment tab to enable automatic text wrap and hyphenation - or, very occasionally, shrinking the text to fit the cell. In a holdover from the earliest days of the personal computer, Calc, like any spreadsheet application, defaults to displaying only a limited number of characters. Tastes differ, but, for me, the most essential of these tabs is Alignment. Visual options are available on five tabs: Font, Font Effects, Alignment, Borders, and Background, all of which you'll find elsewhere in. The cell style window focus largely on visual formatting. What options should you choose for your cell styles? Without marching through every single option, here are some you should consider whenever you design a spreadsheet. The options for each style include both visual and functional formatting, although the style window, unfortunately, isn't organized with those distinctions in mind. If you insist on manual formatting, the same options are available using Format > Cells. Styles aren't as much a necessity in Calc as they are in Writer, since you can still access features even if you don't use them, but they are just as much time-savers, especially if you continually use the same designs.Īs in Writer, styles in Calc are available by selecting Format > Styles and Formatting or by pressing F11.

However, although you can save your own autoformats, for versatility, nothing beats using cell styles and creating your own default template. If you just want a quick splash of color, you can format an entire sheet by selecting Format > Autoformat, or the Choose Theme icon (which seems to have disappeared in the default settings, but is retrievable via Tools > Customize > Toolbars). Many of the options directly effect how you interact with spreadsheets, and even the purely visual ones can make your lists and calculations easier to read at a glance. Still, even if you share this attitude, learning the basic formatting options for cells in Calc can be worth your time.

Certainly, few people worry about their layout than the layout of text documents. Yet, generally, spreadsheets are treated pragmatically. I've seen spreadsheets that are basically interactive tutorials, and many more loaded with what Edward Tufte refers to as 'chartjunk' - embellishments that do nothing to make the presentation of information more effective.

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