Mix Formatting In A Single Cell

September 22, 2021 - by Bill Jelen

Problem: I’d like to use strikethrough on the text in part of a cell. Is this possible?

Strategy: You can apply different formatting to certain characters in a cell.

You select the cell and then press F2 or double-click the cell. Select characters with the mouse or by using the arrow keys in combination with the Shift key. You can then apply formatting. Many icons on the Home tab of the ribbon are enabled. Any formatting shortcut keys, such as Ctrl+5 for strikethrough, will work. If you need to apply superscript or subscript, you use the Format Cells dialog by pressing Ctrl+1 or click the dialog launcher in the bottom-right corner of the Font group.

A1 says "Select part of a cell" and the word Part is selected. In five other examples, part of the cell contains red font, superscript, strikethrough, underline, and subscript. — Figure 86. Format a subset of characters in a cell.

Gotcha: In addition to the character formatting, you can apply other formatting to the entire cell. For example, in C5, you can safely apply italic or underline to the cell without removing the bold from the first word. However, if you apply bold to the entire cell, Excel will not remember that you started with just the first word bold. You can not use the Bold icon on the entire cell to toggle back to the formatting shown in the figure.

Gotcha: If you later use the Justify command, the internal formatting will be lost.

This article is an excerpt from Power Excel With MrExcel

Title photo by Steve Johnson on Unsplash