How to use the Format Painter in Excel
to Copy Formatting – in 2 Clicks!

The format painter is extremely simple. Open up the example spreadsheet to see how it works.

First, select the cell that contains the formatting you’d like to apply to other cells. In our case, that’s cell A1.

Now, click the Format Painter button in the Home tab of the Ribbon.

You’ll see the selected cell highlighted with a moving border, and your cursor change to a cross with a paintbrush.

At this point, you can use the painter. Select any cells that you’d like to receive the same formatting—without lifting your finger from the mouse button.

When you let go, those cells will be formatted in the manner of the cell you selected. In our case, the selected cells become bold and get a blue background:

Here’s the format painter changing the typeface and color:

Here, the typeface remains the same, but the size changes:

You can even change the cell format with the format painter.

Below, you’ll see that I’ve used the format painter to change the cells in the two right-hand columns from General to Text (you can tell by their changing alignment):

While the format painter is pretty straightforward, there are a few things you can do to make it even more useful.

You probably noticed that you can’t use the format painter on non-adjacent cells, because it stop formatting as soon as you let go of the mouse button. You can solve this problem by double-clicking the Format Painter button.

Once you’ve done this, every cell you click on will receive the same formatting.

Another cool trick you can do is paint the formatting from an entire column or row.

Instead of selecting a single cell before clicking Format Painter, select the column you’d like to serve as the basis of your formatting.

Then click the Format Painter button and click on the column you’d like to receive the formatting.

(If you want to try it yourself, open the second sheet in the example workbook.)

Note that the cell you click on is where the format painter will start. In the example above, I clicked on the first cell in the second column, so it matched the formatting of the first column exactly.

If I had clicked a few cells down, the sequence would have started where I clicked.

If you do a lot of formatting in your spreadsheets, the format painter can save you a lot of time. Just format a few cells, then paint them to the rest of your spreadsheet.

It doesn’t get much simpler than that!