If your right hand is on the keyboard, simply hit the Menu Key (MK). To start at the beginning, what’s the fastest way to bring up the basic Paste Options menu that you see below? If your right hand is on the mouse, simply right click (RC). So, in effect, RC=MK, except one uses the mouse and the other uses the keyboard (note: some keyboards surprisingly don’t have a menu key. The Menu Key basically gives you the same menu as Right Clicking does. Below is a picture of the Menu Key in case there’s confusion (it’s at the bottom right of the keyboard). As for nomenclature, RC stands for Right Click and MK stands for Menu Key. The animation below shows some of the neat things Paste Special can do in Excel: pasting just values (no formatting or formulas), pasting a picture (that you can move around) and pasting formatting onto other numbers.īelow are what I’ve found to be the fastest Paste Special methods for various tasks. And pasting can be used in ways you’ve never imagined.
But sometimes you want to do more - or less - when pasting. Ctrl+V performs the basic paste operation - and includes the formulas and formatting, if any. So these are some of the methods you can use to copy formatting from one cell to another cell or range of cells in Excel.The fastest way to cut, copy and paste is by using the keyboard shortcuts Ctr+X, Ctr+C and Ctr+V. This also means that you cannot use this method to copy the formatting to cells or range of cells that are in another sheet or workbook. One drawback of using the fill handle is that your data needs to be in the same column or row where you have the cell from which you are copying the formatting.
While I have shown how to use the Fill Handle to copy formatting for one column only, you can use it the same way for the data in a row of data that spans across multiple rows and columns. Suppose you have a dataset as shown below where you want to copy the formatting from cell A2 to the range of cells in C2:C7 In this case, you need to select a range of cells on which you want to apply the format painter. Just like you can copy the formatting from one cell to another cell, you can also copy it to a range of cells. Excel is smart enough to adjust the rules in conditional formatting in case you’re using custom formulas.
I find it a huge time saver to copy conditional formatting from one cell to another in the same sheet or other sheets. Font characteristics (bold, italics, underline).With Format Painter, you can easily copy the following formatting:
Simply select the cell from where you want to copy the formatting, enable format painter, select the sheet/workbook where you want to paste it, and select the cells in the destination sheet. you can also copy formatting to another sheet or another workbook. Just the way we copied the formatting from one to another in the same sheet. This is how you know that the formatting is copied to the clipboard and you can paste it where you want. Whenever you select a cell and choose Format Painter in the toolbar, the mouse cursor turns into a white cross with a brush.