You can do it in a few ways. First of all you always need to select the cells you are formatting. Press Ctrl - 1 to open the Format Cells dialog box. From there you can pick a wide variety of formatting to apply. You can also use conditional formatting to format cells based on conditions. Formatting can also be pasted from cells that have already formatted using the Format Painter.
It will if you are asking about conditional formatting.
Conditional Formatting.
Apply formatting to the cell that you want. There does not have to be anything in the cell when you apply the formatting. Then when you type a date in, it will show in the format you want.
Numbers are aligned to the right, unless you apply other formatting.
To do that you would use Conditional Formatting. You would set a rule to apply that range and set the formatting that you want for it.
Formatting. There are many ways of formatting dates in Excel.
Conditional formatting is performed in Excel by applying formatting rules to your data. For example, you can apply a two-color scale which automatically applies a different background color to your data; for example lower values with one color and higher values with a different color.
When a pivot table is active, you can show its toolbar in older version of Excel and in the new versions the Pivot Table tools will be on the ribbon. Standard formatting, such as fonts, can be applied with the normal formatting options available in Excel.
Merge brings one to several individual cells from Excel into Word. The formatting in the merged Word document depends on Word, not Excel. If you would like to retain the same formatting as you had in Excel, then format the target location in Word to match the cell from Excel.
It is possible to copy just the formatting of one cell on to others. Normally when you copy you copy the formula, but sometimes you may just want to use the formatting from one cell. So you can take the "formatting only" and apply it to the other cells. This will change the format of the cells, but not what is actually in them.
You can make the table look better by improving the formatting. Headings and totals are made clearer for example. It can help the user to see where things are a lot easier. The formatting will automatically pick up the formulas and apply different formatting than to the data. It is also a quicker way of formatting than doing it manually. It gives consistency to the formatting.
You apply conditional formatting to as many cells on a worksheet as you like.