Excel will then place a dotted line around the selected cell or cells to let you know that something has been copied (in this case, the formatting), and your cursor will change to a paintbrush icon.

If the Excel cell format is not changing to a number because the Number formatting is not working, take these steps to fix the issue.

Conditional formatting highlights key information in a spreadsheet so it’s easy to see at a glance. This beginner’s guide gets you started using conditional formatting.

How to Auto-Format the Date in MS Excel. When you create Microsoft Excel spreadsheets that contain one or more columns of dates, you can make things a bit easier if you pre-format your cells to ...

It's not easy to fool Excel, but with a few extra clicks, you can work around this odd pasting behavior. If you paste formatted values into a cell with another applied format, the pasted format wins.

Excel's conditional formatting lets you customize how your data displays, from changing colors and shading to adding icons and more. Here's how it works.

The latest update to Excel for the web brings new options for cell colors, cell formatting, and tables. There's also a new printing experience on the way.