Excel for the web gains new options for colors, cell formatting, and tables
The latest update to Excel for the web adds new options for colors, tables, and more.

What you need to know
- Microsoft just rolled out an update to Excel for the web.
- The update brings new options for cell colors, cell formatting, and tables.
- A new printing experience is also on the way, though it isn't here just yet.
Microsoft released an update for Excel for the web earlier this week. The company outlines the update in a Tech Community post (opens in new tab). The update brings several new features, including new options for cell colors, cell formatting, and tables. The general theme behind the update is helping people create uniform spreadsheets. Microsoft also announced a new printing experience for Excel online, though it isn't available yet.
Excel online now supports custom colors within cells. You can click on the "more colors" option and then pick a specific color using sliders. You can also enter Hex values or RGB values to make sure the spreadsheet uses the exact color that you'd like.
You can also make sure your cells look the way you'd like by applying cell styles, which let you select fonts, number formats, cell borders, and shading. These styles can be easily applied to any cells in which you'd like to ensure a consistent look.
Separating cells is easier as well, with the new options to draw borders, draw border grids, and erase borders.
Moving over to tables, you can now select table designs and styling options, rename tables, and add a total row. You can also format any data as a table.
It isn't available in the current version of Excel for the web, but you'll soon be able to use a new printing experience. Once it's available, you'll be able to set a print area and insert and delete page breaks.
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Sean Endicott brings nearly a decade of experience covering Microsoft and Windows news to Windows Central. He joined our team in 2017 as an app reviewer and now heads up our day-to-day news coverage. If you have a news tip or an app to review, hit him up at sean.endicott@futurenet.com (opens in new tab).
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Great news. I assume this will also affect Excel within Teams, because that basically uses the web version and are core to some of Teams' collaboration features. Any idea if this update will also make it possible to display rotated text in a cell on the web? This is one of our big problems with the web (and Teams) version -- files that have 45 degree or 90 degree rotated text in Excel on the Desktop, common in heading rows, look terrible on the web, because the text reverts to horizontal, making them very hard to read.
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In looking at Excel on the Web User Voice, I see rotating text is actually the #1 requested feature and looks like it's not part of this update.