One of Excel’s most useful Ribbon / toolbar icons is the Format Painter.

To use it first select a cell or range that has the format you want to use. Then you click the Format Painter icon and click another cell to apply all the formats that the original cell had.

Double Click Trick

Many people don’t realise that when you double click the Format Painter icon you can the paste the required format multiple times. You’ll notice that the mouse cursor will retain the paint brush icon. To stop pasting press the Esc key or click the Format Painter icon again.

This is really useful for applying the same conditional formats to other cells. Conditional formats can take time to create and the Format Painter makes it easy to apply them to other ranges.

You can find the Format Painter icon in other Microsoft Office packages as well.