What is your favorite font in Excel? Anna and Lisa showed me the Consolas font. It is great because you can tell zero from O and one from lower case L.
Table of Contents
(0:00) Axel font for Excel
(0:19) Typewriters without a 1 key
(0:54) People who type L instead of 1
(2:04) How I met ExcelisFun
(2:37) Make a custom Office Theme with Consolas font
(3:32) Applying a custom office theme
(3:45) Making a theme be default
(4:09) Default Font in Excel Options
Table of Contents
(0:00) Axel font for Excel
(0:19) Typewriters without a 1 key
(0:54) People who type L instead of 1
(2:04) How I met ExcelisFun
(2:37) Make a custom Office Theme with Consolas font
(3:32) Applying a custom office theme
(3:45) Making a theme be default
(4:09) Default Font in Excel Options
Transcript of the video:
A hot tip from Anna and Lisa, use the Consolas font for Excel.
It was 13 years ago that Eric Speakerman came out with a font specifically for Excel.
I bought this font, but geez, that was seven computers ago.
I don't have Axel anymore. And the issue, here's the issue.
For those of us old enough to remember the days of typewriters, check out this typewriter.
This was like the typewriter that I learned on typing glass with Mrs. Marefka.
There's no “1” key on this keyboard.
It's crazy.
If we were supposed to type a 1, we had to use the lowercase L.
And for an exclamation point, we had to type the apostrophe and then backspace, and then period. What a pain that was.
The problem we have is people who learned how to type in that era might still be using a lowercase L. Like, check this out.
80 plus 80 plus 81 – it says the total is 80. Well, clearly that's not right.
We've run into these people who are using Ls for one and Os for zero.
All right, so here's the whole trick. There is a font.
Now, I always recommend Courier New as a font so you can see fixed width files are actually fixed width.
But Anna and Lisa pointed out Consolas or Consolas - I don't know. What a great font this is.
So just select all of your cells, switch to Consolas.
You can tell that the zero there has a slash through it.
So like that zero is really an O. It becomes very obvious, the zeroes and the Os.
So in find and replace, we replace an O with a zero, replace all and then look for lowercase Ls and change those to ones.
Replace all, click close, and now our totals are right. Zeros, letter O-s, ones and lowercase L-s.
The way that I met Mike Girvin from ExcelIsFun.
It was so funny.
I was on the phone with a guy from California who was trying to create a spreadsheet for fruit & nut trail mix.
He says, "Hey, have you seen that funny Excel guy on YouTube?" I'm like, "I'm the funny Excel guy on YouTube". He says, "no, funnier than you”.
His videos are great, but he can't spell Excel". And he says "he is Excell’s fun".
Well, no, Mike Girvin is not Excell’s Fun.
The problem is the font that YouTube uses, the lowercase L and the capital i look exactly the same.
In Consolas, that'll never be an issue. All right.
Now what if you want to make an office theme with Consolas, right?
So back here on page layout, we have a lot of themes built in and you can create your own theme, right? So what are we going to do here?
We're going to come in, I'm going to make an Excel theme.
So I'm going to choose green as the colors.
Under effects, my favorite effects is the old Office 2007 theme because it adds a little bit of glow to the edges of shapes.
And then we're going to go into fonts and we're going to customize the fonts.
And for the heading font, we'll choose Consolas. And for the body font, we'll choose Consolas.
And we'll call this Excel. Click save.
All right, so now under themes, we're going to save the current theme.
We'll call this Excel and any workbook that I have, we should just be able to come to page layout, themes, choose Excel, and we'll get the right fonts and those colors.
Now, wouldn't it be nice if we could come in here and right-click this and say that this should be the default for all future workbooks, but unfortunately we don't have that.
You're stuck with going back to this video, 1987, and going through all the steps to create a blank workbook. Choose the theme, save it as book.xltx in your Excel start folder. It's really kind of a pain.
Is there anything easier?
Yeah, what you could do, what you could do, at least for all new workbooks, file, options.
And then right here, use this as the default font for creating new workbooks.
Change from body font and choose Consolas, and choose Consolas from that list.
That only affects new workbooks, though, not workbooks that other people send to you.
A great shout out for Anna and Lisa for passing along that information about the Consolas font.
Check that out if you're working with this guy who still types lowercase ls for his number one. I want to thank you for stopping by.
We'll see you next time for another net cast from MrExcel.
It was 13 years ago that Eric Speakerman came out with a font specifically for Excel.
I bought this font, but geez, that was seven computers ago.
I don't have Axel anymore. And the issue, here's the issue.
For those of us old enough to remember the days of typewriters, check out this typewriter.
This was like the typewriter that I learned on typing glass with Mrs. Marefka.
There's no “1” key on this keyboard.
It's crazy.
If we were supposed to type a 1, we had to use the lowercase L.
And for an exclamation point, we had to type the apostrophe and then backspace, and then period. What a pain that was.
The problem we have is people who learned how to type in that era might still be using a lowercase L. Like, check this out.
80 plus 80 plus 81 – it says the total is 80. Well, clearly that's not right.
We've run into these people who are using Ls for one and Os for zero.
All right, so here's the whole trick. There is a font.
Now, I always recommend Courier New as a font so you can see fixed width files are actually fixed width.
But Anna and Lisa pointed out Consolas or Consolas - I don't know. What a great font this is.
So just select all of your cells, switch to Consolas.
You can tell that the zero there has a slash through it.
So like that zero is really an O. It becomes very obvious, the zeroes and the Os.
So in find and replace, we replace an O with a zero, replace all and then look for lowercase Ls and change those to ones.
Replace all, click close, and now our totals are right. Zeros, letter O-s, ones and lowercase L-s.
The way that I met Mike Girvin from ExcelIsFun.
It was so funny.
I was on the phone with a guy from California who was trying to create a spreadsheet for fruit & nut trail mix.
He says, "Hey, have you seen that funny Excel guy on YouTube?" I'm like, "I'm the funny Excel guy on YouTube". He says, "no, funnier than you”.
His videos are great, but he can't spell Excel". And he says "he is Excell’s fun".
Well, no, Mike Girvin is not Excell’s Fun.
The problem is the font that YouTube uses, the lowercase L and the capital i look exactly the same.
In Consolas, that'll never be an issue. All right.
Now what if you want to make an office theme with Consolas, right?
So back here on page layout, we have a lot of themes built in and you can create your own theme, right? So what are we going to do here?
We're going to come in, I'm going to make an Excel theme.
So I'm going to choose green as the colors.
Under effects, my favorite effects is the old Office 2007 theme because it adds a little bit of glow to the edges of shapes.
And then we're going to go into fonts and we're going to customize the fonts.
And for the heading font, we'll choose Consolas. And for the body font, we'll choose Consolas.
And we'll call this Excel. Click save.
All right, so now under themes, we're going to save the current theme.
We'll call this Excel and any workbook that I have, we should just be able to come to page layout, themes, choose Excel, and we'll get the right fonts and those colors.
Now, wouldn't it be nice if we could come in here and right-click this and say that this should be the default for all future workbooks, but unfortunately we don't have that.
You're stuck with going back to this video, 1987, and going through all the steps to create a blank workbook. Choose the theme, save it as book.xltx in your Excel start folder. It's really kind of a pain.
Is there anything easier?
Yeah, what you could do, what you could do, at least for all new workbooks, file, options.
And then right here, use this as the default font for creating new workbooks.
Change from body font and choose Consolas, and choose Consolas from that list.
That only affects new workbooks, though, not workbooks that other people send to you.
A great shout out for Anna and Lisa for passing along that information about the Consolas font.
Check that out if you're working with this guy who still types lowercase ls for his number one. I want to thank you for stopping by.
We'll see you next time for another net cast from MrExcel.
