I saw a spreadsheet once that looked really cool and professional. It had a dark header row with white text. The data was black text with a white background and the grid lines were a light gray. When the grid lines are a light color, they become useful for highlighting the data rather than competing with it. Once I figured out how to crawl behind the menus and find this fancy formatting feature I was hooked. I want to share it with you.

TIP: Pull up an existing spreadsheet that you want to spiff up.

1. Highlight the all the data fields. You can exclude the header row for now. We’ll treat that with a separate look.
2. On th menu bar select Format|Cells. The Format Cells dialog appears.
3. Select the Border tab. It looks like a complicated screen but you’ll get the hang of it.
4. From the three squares on the top select Inside. This means you want to show interior gridlines – all but the border around the data. Notice that two crossed lines appear below in the preview window.
5. Now let’s pick the color of the grid lines. Click the dropdown under color and select grey 40%.
6. Click on each line in the preview grid and change them to the gray instead of black. Notice when you click on the line again it disappears. It’s like an on/off switch. click it it’s on, click it it’s off. You can change the line size and color very easily. The lines on the outside of the square represent the border of the entire Excel table. The two interior lines represent the grid lines inside the table.
7. Play with all the settings and see how they look. Play with color and line width of the border and the interior grids. It’s really not hard once you know where things are and you’ve had time to experiment.

Here’s a good Excel template you can experiment with: Expense Voucher Template
Have fun!