Google Sheets offers several formatting options to make your numbers and text look nice and easy to read. Google Sheets has options to change the font, size, and color of your text, but some of the simplest and fastest changes include applying bold, italics, underline, and strikethrough to your text.
Bold makes the text thicker.
Italics makes the text slant forward.
Underline adds a line under the text.
Strikethrough adds a line through the text.
While all of the formatting styles listed above can be accessed in the Format menu of the toolbar (see image below) it is much faster to add these styles with keyboard shortcuts. Learning these keyboard shortcuts may feel awkward at first, but mastering keyboard shortcuts in Google Sheets will help you work faster and more efficiently over time to make you more productive.
Select the cell or group of cells which you want to make bold, then hold Control and press B (on a PC) or hold ⌘ and press B (on a Mac).
Select your chosen cell or group of cells, then hold Control and press I (on a PC) or hold ⌘ and press I (on a Mac).
Select your desired cell or group of cells, then hold Control and press U (on a PC) or hold ⌘ and press U (on a Mac).
Select your desired cell or group of cells, then hold Alt and Shift and press 5 (on a PC) or hold ⌘ and Shift and press X (on a Mac).
The methods mentioned above (both the toolbar and shortcut options) apply the formatting style to all of the text in the cell or group of cells. For example, if you select a certain cell which contains text and then use the shortcut to bold the text, then all of the text in the cell will become bold. But what if you only want to bold or underline certain text in a cell? Fortunately Google Sheets offers a way to do this too!
First, double click on the cell. You will see a cursor start blinking at the end of the text in the cell. Next, use the cursor to highlight the portion of text that you want to make bold, italics, underline, or strikethrough. Finally, while the specified text is still highlighted, use the shortcuts mentioned above, or use the format menu to apply your formatting. You can also apply different formatting to different text within the same cell. For example, you could make one word bold and the next word italics, all in the same cell!
As shown in the image above, we can add bold, italics, underlining, and strikethrough all within the game cell!
To fully commit these shortcuts to memory you need to get some hands on experience. Try some practice problems with the text formatting shortcuts in our interactive Google Sheets Tutorial now!