Colors and Fonts for Worksheet Tabs

Excel is quite configurable in how information appears on your screen. At some time you may want to change the appearance of the worksheet tabs at the bottom of your workbook. Unfortunately, Excel allows very little customization of the way worksheet tabs are presented.

If you want to change the font used in a worksheet tab, you need to change the fonts used by Windows (not Excel) to displays information. You can right-click on your desktop, choose Properties, and then click on the Appearance tab. Changes you make on this tab will affect all programs running on your system, not just Excel.

If you want to change the color used to displays a worksheet tab, you are completely out of luck if you are using Excel 97 or Excel 2000. If you are using Excel 2002 or later, you can changing the formatting for a tab by following these steps:

1. Right-click on the worksheet tab you want to change. Excel displays a Context menu.
2. Choose Tab Color from the Context menu. Excel displays the Format Tab Color dialog box. (Click here to see a related figure.) (In Excel 2007 you don't see a dialog box; you see a palette of available colors.)
3. Select a color to use for the tab.
4. Click on OK.

It is interesting that if you set the colors for worksheet tabs and then open the worksheet in Excel 2000, the tabs don't show in color—they show in gray. Excel 2000 won't get rid of the colors, however. They will still be there when you later open the workbook in a version of Excel that supports the colors.