What does the format button allows you to do in Excel?

Answer 1

You may be referring to the format painter button, which has a little paintbrush on it. What it does is take the formatting from one cell or a set of cells, and applies it to other cells. So if you do something like put a number into a cell, bold it, colour the cell red, format the number to 2 decimal places and change the font size, that cell will have that formatting. To do the same for other cells may take some time. So what you can do is first select that cell and click on the format painter button. Then you would select a range of cells that you want to apply that formatting to. It will immediately format all the cells to be the same as the original one. It won't change any numbers or formulas in those cells, just change the formatting. So it is painting the formatting of one cell onto other cells.