Please Note: This article is written for users of the following Microsoft Excel versions: 2007, 2010, and 2013. If you are using an earlier version (Excel 2003 or earlier), this tip may not work for you. For a version of this tip written specifically for earlier versions of Excel, click here: Using Strikethrough Formatting.

Using Strikethrough Formatting

by Allen Wyatt
(last updated September 13, 2014)

2

One of the character formats you can use within Excel is referred to as strikethrough. This simply means that Excel shows a horizontal line through the middle of the character (or characters) to which the attribute has been applied. Strikethrough can be applied in this manner:
  1. Select the cell whose contents you want struck through, or select the characters within a cell, if you don't want them all struck through.
  2. Press Ctrl+Shift+F to display the Format Cells dialog box.
  3. Make sure the Font tab is displayed. (See Figure 1.)

    4. Figure 1. The Font tab of the Format Cells dialog box.

  4. Select the Strikethrough check box.
  5. Click OK.

ExcelTips is your source for cost-effective Microsoft Excel training. This tip (10633) applies to Microsoft Excel 2007, 2010, and 2013. You can find a version of this tip for the older menu interface of Excel here: Using Strikethrough Formatting.

Author Bio

Allen Wyatt

With more than 50 non-fiction books and numerous magazine articles to his credit, Allen Wyatt is an internationally recognized author. He is president of Sharon Parq Associates, a computer and publishing services company. ...

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What is nine more than 3?

2014-09-14 00:52:41

David Brownstein

I don't know the background to this request for help, but it might be because of a need to show the delta between two versions of a spreadsheet, in the same way as revision marks (track changes) work in Word.

If that is what you want to do, then you can copy the contents of the two version of the worksheets to two Word documents, run a compare in Word, and then copy the compare result (with revision marks) back into Excel. The resulting spreadsheet will be automatically formatted to reflect the delta. Note that this only formatting, not genuine revision marks, but it is a quicker and more efficient way to display multiple revisions, rather than selecting and reformatting part of the text in a cell.

2014-09-13 18:15:08

Dennis Taylor

And it's even easier to use Ctrl+5

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