How to Merge Cell Styles in Excel

Cell Styles in Excel help you quickly customize the layout of your workbooks. They’re a great way to add stylistic flair and unique designs. Often, you may find yourself building custom Cell Styles. What you may not know is that you can re-use these custom styles across multiple workbooks! Let’s learn how to merge Cell Styles in Microsoft Excel.

How to Merge Cell Styles in Excel

Let’s imagine that you’ve created a custom Cell Style in an Excel workbook. You’re now working in a second file, and want to re-use that same style in the new sheet. Of course, you could start over and create the style from scratch. But thanks to Excel, you don’t have to!

Excel offers the ability to merge Cell Styles; in other words, you can import your custom designs. This saves you time and helps maintain consistent styling across multiple spreadsheets.

To merge Cell Styles in Excel, begin by going to the Home tab. This is found on Excel’s ribbon. Then, click on the Cell Styles dropdown menu. You’ll see several options. The one you want is at the bottom: Merge Styles. Go ahead and click on it.

Excel opens the Import Cell Styles menu. Keep in mind, to perform this activity, you’ll need to have the spreadsheet containing the style you’re importing open in the background.

Choose it from the list, then click OK. Excel may ask if you want to import Cell Styles with the same name. To import, choose Replace. Excel will then import the Cell Style from the original file.

To apply the style in your new worksheet, click on the Cell Styles dropdown again. You’ll see your imported design in the Custom section at the top. Click on its thumbnail to apply it to any cell that you have selected.

As you can see, it’s easy to merge Cell Styles in Microsoft Excel.