Most of you are probably already familiar with the Format Painter. It’s the paint brush button near the left end of the ribbon in Excel, Word, and Outlook. For those of you who haven’t used it before, it lets you copy the formatting from one place and apply somewhere else. Just select the cell or text that is already formatted the way you want, click the Format Painter button, then click on the cells or text that you want to format. The formatting to copy can be one cell or multiple cells, just click and drag to select an area to copy. Click the Format Painter button. Then click on another cell and the formatting will be applied to the same shaped range, using the cell you clicked on as the starting point. You can also select a range of cells for the destination and the formatting from the source will be repeated over the entire destination.
Here’s the part that most people don’t know. If you want to copy formatting to several locations, you can double-click the Format Painter button. Then it will stay active until you turn it off by clicking it again, or pressing the Esc key. While it is active, you can keep clicking on cells to apply the formatting that you copied.
