Here we have a completely blank Excel, apart from eight cells that have some numbers in. We've got four positive numbers, 1, 10, 100, and 1,000, and we've got the same figures but now in negatives. This sheet only has Windows standard Excel styles. What I'd like to do is I'd like to change the normal Excel style. I'd like the thousands to have a thousand separator. I'd like all my figures to have a decimal place, and I'd like my negatives to be shown with brackets rather than with a negative sign at the beginning. I'd also like there to be a space in the positives the size of a closed bracket to the right-hand side. So I go into my cell styles. The shortcut for that is Alt + H + J, and I can see under the good, bad and neutral section that there is a normal. What I need to do is right click on that normal and then click on modify. Now at the moment, everything in this dialog box is ticked, so there's a tick next to number, alignment, font, border, fill, and protection. We want to leave all of these ticks because the normal cell style underlies all other styles. So I'm going to click format and the one big thing I want to change is the number. So in number, I click on number but then I click on Custom because we want to change it. I'm now going to type in here what I want a positive number to look like and that was #,##0.0_, closed bracket.

So a positive number will have a thousands separator, a decimal place, and a space the size of a closed bracket. I then click semicolon and I now want to type in what a negative number will look like, which is open brackets, #,##0.0, close brackets.

I could now put in how I want a zero to be styled and that will be 0.0_ closed brackets. Now, you might notice that's exactly the same as a positive number was shown, so technically, I don't have to show how this is done, but I could have used something else. I could have used a dash for a zero. Lastly, ;@_ close brackets. That should now apply to all cells. So I press OK. I press OK again, and I can see that has instantly changed all of the cells. I've got one decimal place, I've got thousand separator, and on the positive numbers, I've got a space the size of a closed bracket. If I now put a one, a 10, a 100 and a 1,000, I can see that my positives and negatives all have the decimal place lined up. Lastly, I can put some texts in here and at the moment, that is left aligned. If I write align that, I can see again that that is perfectly lined up with my positive number. That cell style will now apply to all cells within this file. You could save this file as a template in which case I would delete out all the contents. I would then go to a File, Save As and instead of saving it as an xlsx, I would save it as an xltx, and then when I go to File, New, I could click on my templates and then choose the file name that I had saved, and that means that that cell style can be used in other files going forward.