Excel has special formatting built in for many types of data, but it also has the ability to do custom formatting. This article will cover a couple of the lesser known formats, and how to access the custom formatting.
First, select the range of data you want to format, and click the number format drop down on the home tab:
You can also right click within the selection and select "Format Cells" from the pop-up menu.
Once you do a box will come up. On the number tab, select the "Special" category from the box on the left:
From here, you can select the format of the ZIP code or phone number you wish. Please note that ZIP code can be just the 5 digit code, or you can choose to format it with the additional 4 digits:
These formatting items only change the appearance of the data, not the actual input of the data, as you can see in the edit bar above.
You also have a choice to select custom formatting, should the data you have not fit any of the conventional formatting:
There are many pre-built custom formats, or you can choose to create your own format. Looking at the selected item above, the formatting in front of the semi colon is for positive values, and the formatting after the semi colon is for negative values. Color can be added by putting the color you want in square brackets [] in front of the formatting you want to be colored.