Use Special Templates to Switch Fonts

In Excel, as in other Office apps, you can accomplish many tasks in more than one way. The next tweaks we'll consider involve a feature in Excel that you can use to make a wide range of custom adjustments.

Two important characteristics of any new Excel workbook are its typeface and its font size. Excel 2007 defaults to the Calibri font set in 11-point size. If you prefer a different typeface--or if your company has a standard font that you're expected to use--you could change the font every time you open a new workbook file, or you could save a workbook template containing the settings you want and then make a copy of that file whenever you want to create a new workbook.

But there's another way to handle templating. Most Office users know that Word 2007 uses templates where they can store formatting and other settings until the next time they want to create a new document. But not many people realize that Excel has a similar template feature; and even fewer realize that Excel 2007 permits users to create two special "global" templates that incorporate customized special properties.

The two templates are Book.xltx and Sheet.xltx. Excel uses the first of these whenever you create a new workbook, and it uses the second whenever you add a new worksheet to an existing workbook. For the tweaks discussed here, we'll stick to the Book.xltx template, but you should be aware that Sheet.xltx works in much the same way.