Rounded Corners on Cells

Pressing the Alt key while drawing the "rectangle rounded corners" shape will snap to the grid. When you resize a cell the rectangle rounded corners will resize with the cell. Once the rectangle rounded corners has been drawn and copied as desired, go to the View Tab on the ribbon and unselect Gridlines.

I've just tried this and it works a treat, but I found the resizing drawback Allen mentions need not be a problem. When I set the Shape properties to move and size with cells, the border resizes to match the cell size. The only difficulty is editing the cell contents with the transparent shape over it, but that is easy enough to work around.

Don, I see what you mean now.

I was envisioning that the entire sheet - every single cell - would be outlined with rounded corners. Were this the case, a camera picture wouldn't work because it doesn't variably expand and contract.

But if you use the camera photo to highlight specific cells, I agree that it is a great tool.

Sorry for my misunderstanding. - Erik

Thanks, Don - I hadn't used the Camera before but once I added it to my toolbar and started playing around with this, I find it's easy to use and perfectly stable.

I also like your idea of using it for a dashboard element -- previously I had used buttons to invoke macros that incorporated named ranges, etc., but this is so much easier!

Erik
I have not seen any of the limitations of which you speak. (Excel 2010)

The Camera can take a picture of a single cell or a large surrounding group of cells. The resulting picture can be placed anywhere such as on a different worksheet. The picture can be cropped as well as using any effect such as glow, bevel, shadow, etc. Columns in the picture can be multiple widths and rows can have different heights. If the source area of the picture has its columns or rows resized the picture expands or contracts to match.

In the original case we can assume that the rounded corners are needed for emphasis, clarity, or "good looks". Lets say the cell in question is a column total. That total value can be placed elsewhere on the sheet or on another sheet. Take a picture of it and locate the fancy framed picture under the column being totaled. If the column is widened the picture of the total will expand to match.

An extremely fancy worksheet can be developed by eliminating the grid lines and adding several pictures of the real data. (Sort of a simplistic dash-board)

Don, that is a great suggestion as long as all your cells are the same size. But if some columns are wider/narrower than others, and/or some rows are taller/shorter than others, this will not work. It also won't work if only a subset of rows and/or columns are changed.

One of the most neglected capabilities in Excel is the easy to use camera. The camera takes a picture of an area of cell(s). The camera's picture is like any image in that it may be placed anywhere, may have any picture frame, may be resized, may be oriented any way, and best of all the picture is automatically updated to match the changes in the source cells of the picture. Rounded corners? Yes, and much more.

If you change the properties of the object "border" to resize with the cells size, then when somebody changes the cells size, the "border" will adjust itself to the same size of the cells.