Why Change the Formatting?

You could build an entire workbook with no special formatting at all. Excel's default styles, fonts, alignments, and other settings for text and numbers are sufficient for the legible and accurate display and printing of worksheet data. When you first open a workbook, it displays the default lines between columns and rows in Excel. If you don't want the row and column lines, you can select the entire worksheet as shown in Figure 5.1, and then fill the worksheet with the color white. This gives you a clean canvas with which to start. You could also select the Tools menu and choose Options, and then select the View tab. From the View tab, check the Turn Off the Gridlines option.

Figure 5.1. Excel's default format uses lines between columns and rows. Eliminate the lines by filling the worksheet with white.