The fee earning staff at my office, being accountants, are all trained in using Excel as a calculating tool, so are far better than me with formulas etc.  However, for making it actually look tidy, most aren't so good, and one tip that I have to pass on quite regularly is how to get a blank background with no gridlines.  This being select > right click > format cells > patterns > choose colour.  I think they're thrown by the fact that it's called "patterns" in Excel and "fill" in Word or Powerpoint.  For anything that's going to be printed, it doesn't matter, but if the spreadsheet is being inserted into Powerpoint, you have to do this or you get visible gridlines when printed.  We have so many reports and presentations in Powerpoint with Excel worksheets inserted into them, that this one is actually quite important.