Style Brush???

Question

Level 1

8 points

Style Brush???

Hi, I have previously used Excel and there is a handy style brush feature. With the brush you can copy the style attributes of a cell to other cells; ie. font size and color etc. Is there a way that this works in Numbers?? I have tried the paste and copy style command, but it does not seem to have the same effect.

Thanks for any advice::)
Jukka

Mac OS X (10.5.6)

Posted on Oct 20, 2010 7:09 AM

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Answer 1

Oct 20, 2010 8:05 AM in response to Solartemis

Hi Jukka,

Well, there are some differences. Copy Style and Paste Style copy different elements of formatting than the Paintbrush does. There have been discussions here about what is, and is not, included in Paste Style, and you can search them. The thing that seems to work best for me is to Edit > Copy the cell that has the format I want, and then Edit Paste it into the cell that I want the Style copied into. Then I replace the content with what I want in the new cell. Or, Paste and Match Style into it from content obtained elsewhere.

It would help to know just what part of Style you expected and didn't get.

Jerry

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Answer 2

Aug 27, 2012 8:33 AM in response to Zorkarcmur

You can make the shading as follows:

A1=0

A1=MOD(A1+1, 4)

select A2 and fill to the right thru F1

B2=F1

select B1 thru F1 and fill down one row

now select A1 thru F1 and fill down

Now select the all cells in the table, and open the conditional formatting rules by selecting the menu item "Format > Show Conditional Formatting Rules"

then set up the rules as shown above. This table may be placed behind another table with numeric data where the fill is set to "none"

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Answer 3

Jan 15, 2011 5:59 AM in response to Jerrold Green1

I too have a problem with this.

The problem is how to rapidly copy not a style, but a complex of styles. If I click 'blue fill' it fills all cells in the table with blue. There is no easy way to fill three rows blue, three rows no fill, repeat

I'm trying to create a fairly data-dense table. To make it easier to interpret, and to get it on one page I want to do the following:

1. Set the fills for my data. I have a fairly complex fill pattern to emphasis the diagonal relationship in data. E.g. the fill colours will work like this, where 1,2,3,4 are pastels of red green yellow blue

1111 2222 3333 4444 1111 2222
2222 3333 4444 1111 2222 3333
3333 4444 1111 2222 3333 4444
4444 1111 2222 3333 4444 1111
...
Heavier column borders between every 4 columns.

How do I paste THAT cell fill pattern over the most (but not all) of the data window?

Second task:

Each group of 4 columns has widths of 0.5 cm 0.5 cm 1 cm 1 cm.
How do I paste the widths from the first set of 4 columns to the remaining 5 sets

Column 4 in every group is in italic, column 2 is in bold, Column 1 and 2 have conditional formats so that positive numbers are in red, negative numbers in blue. How do I paste ALL of that for the 4 column block in one go?

In Excel this is done with the paste special command, and you can selectively choose which classes of attributes to paste. In addition Excel has a 'paint format' tool which, once you have a block that has the attributes you want, you can mark that block, and then drag the format brush on the area you want to be similar.

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Answer 4

KOENIG Yvan

Level 8

41,819 points

Jan 15, 2011 8:29 AM in response to Zorkarcmur

Happily, Numbers doesn't try to mlimic Excel.
They are already several clones of this "gas factory", no need to create a new one.

As I often wrote, *_if Excel does that, use it._*
Don't worry, we will not cry 😉

Yvan KOENIG (VALLAURIS, France) samedi 15 janvier 2011 17:28:09

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Answer 5

Aug 26, 2012 8:08 PM in response to Zorkarcmur

Yep - this aspect of Numbers is crap... First of all, applying the formatting is VERY clumsy - and takes a long time. Then is you want to move or copy the cell elsewhere, you have to re-do all the formatting. Its CRAP - and it has been crap since Numbers was first released. Perhaps Apple don't use Numbers in-house? I can't imagine they would put up with this...

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