Introducing Model Styles: Every Spreadsheet, Exactly Your Way

Today we're launching Model Styles — a feature that changes how every spreadsheet Viete generates looks and feels.

The idea is simple: you define your formatting standards once, and every model Viete creates from that point forward follows them automatically. Your colors. Your fonts. Your header conventions. Your number formats. Your layout structure. Your brand — applied consistently to every workbook, every tab, every cell, without you having to think about it.

If you've ever spent time reformatting an AI-generated spreadsheet to match your firm's standards, that time is now zero.

Why Formatting Matters More Than People Admit

There's a persistent myth in the modeling world that formatting is cosmetic — that substance matters and presentation doesn't. Anyone who has presented a financial model to an investment committee, a board of directors, or a client knows this is wrong.

Formatting communicates professionalism, attention to detail, and trustworthiness. A model with inconsistent fonts, misaligned columns, and clashing colors doesn't just look bad — it makes people question the numbers. Fair or not, the first impression of a spreadsheet's reliability comes from how it looks, not from auditing the formulas.

More practically, formatting conventions carry meaning. In the Wall Street modeling tradition, blue font means hard-coded input, black means formula, green means a link to another sheet. At consulting firms, specific row heights, column widths, and header styles signal the document's place in the firm's deliverable hierarchy. At accounting firms, particular number formats, sign conventions, and border styles are non-negotiable standards.

Every professional team has these conventions. Until today, applying them to AI-generated spreadsheets was manual work. Model Styles eliminates that work entirely.

How Model Styles Work

Create a style from an existing spreadsheet

The fastest way to define a Model Style is to upload a spreadsheet that already looks the way you want. Viete analyzes the workbook and extracts its formatting DNA — every visual choice, structural pattern, and convention embedded in the file:

• Color palette — header backgrounds, accent colors, alternating row shading, chart color sequences, conditional formatting thresholds
• Typography — font family, sizes for headers vs. body vs. footnotes, bold and italic usage patterns, text alignment conventions
• Number formatting — decimal places for different metric types, thousands separators, percentage formats, currency symbols, negative number treatment (parentheses vs. minus sign), date formats
• Layout structure — column widths, row heights, margin rows between sections, header row placement, where inputs go vs. outputs, print area configuration
• Cell styling — border conventions (which cells get borders, what weight, what color), cell protection patterns, input cell highlighting
• Sheet conventions — tab naming patterns, tab ordering logic, tab color coding, cover page layout, table of contents structure
• Chart styling — chart type preferences, axis formatting, legend placement, gridline visibility, data label format

Viete captures all of this from your uploaded file and saves it as a reusable Model Style. You name it — "Investment Memo Standard," "Client Deliverable," "Internal Analysis," "Board Pack" — and it's available for every future generation.

Or build a style from scratch

If you don't have an existing spreadsheet that perfectly represents your standard, you can define a Model Style through conversation. Describe what you want:

"Use Calibri 10pt for body text, Calibri 11pt bold for section headers. Navy blue header row with white text. Light gray alternating rows. Numbers in #,##0 format with one decimal for percentages. Negative numbers in red parentheses. No gridlines. Thin borders on data tables. Tab colors: blue for inputs, black for calculations, green for outputs."

Viete translates these instructions into a complete style definition. You can preview it on a sample model, adjust anything that isn't quite right, and save it when you're satisfied.

Apply to any model, any time

Once a Model Style exists, applying it is effortless. When you generate a new model, select which style to use — or set a default style that applies automatically. The model comes out formatted exactly to spec. No post-generation cleanup. No manual reformatting. No "good enough" compromises.

You can also apply a Model Style retroactively to existing workbooks. Have a model you built last month that needs to match the new firm standard? Apply the style and the formatting updates throughout — colors, fonts, number formats, layout — while preserving all the data and formulas.

Built for Teams, Not Just Individuals

Model Styles are shared across your team. When someone on the team creates or updates a style, everyone benefits. This solves the consistency problem that plagues every organization with more than one person building spreadsheets.

Firm-wide standards

Define your firm's official Model Style and set it as the team default. Every model generated by anyone on the team follows the same formatting conventions. New hires produce output that's indistinguishable from a ten-year veteran's work — because the style enforces the standard automatically.

Client-specific styles

Consulting firms and advisory shops that deliver spreadsheets to clients can create a Model Style for each client. Client A gets their brand colors and preferred layout. Client B gets a completely different look. Switching between them is a single selection, not hours of reformatting.

Purpose-specific styles

Different deliverables have different standards. Your internal working model can use a dense, information-rich layout optimized for analysis. The board presentation version of the same model can use a clean, spacious layout optimized for readability. The investor data room version can follow a third convention. Same model, different style — applied in seconds.

What Changes in Practice

Before Model Styles, the workflow for a formatted deliverable looked like this:

1. Generate the model (the substance)
2. Reformat headers, fonts, and colors to match your standard
3. Fix number formats across hundreds of cells
4. Adjust column widths and row heights
5. Apply borders and shading
6. Update chart colors and formatting
7. Add logo and cover page
8. Review for formatting consistency

Steps 2 through 8 are pure overhead. They add no analytical value. They're mechanical, repetitive, and frustrating — especially when you're doing them for the fifteenth time this month.

With Model Styles, the workflow becomes:

1. Generate the model with your chosen style
2. Review the analysis

That's it. The formatting is handled. You focus on the work that matters — the analysis, the assumptions, the narrative, the decision.

Details That Matter

A few things we got right that are worth mentioning:

Styles are intelligent, not mechanical

Model Styles don't just apply a fixed format map to fixed cell positions. They understand the structure of the spreadsheet. If a model has seven tabs and another has twelve, the style applies correctly to both — headers are headers, data tables are data tables, summary rows are summary rows, regardless of where they fall in the workbook. The style adapts to the content, not the other way around.

Number formats follow context

Your style can define different number formats for different types of data — currency for revenue, percentage for margins, integer for headcount, one decimal for ratios — and Viete applies the right format to the right metric automatically. You don't need to specify "cell B14 should be currency." You define the rule once ("all revenue metrics in $#,##0") and the style handles the rest.

Print-ready output

Model Styles include print configuration — page orientation, margins, headers and footers, page breaks, print areas, and scaling. The spreadsheet that comes out is ready to print or export to PDF without adjustment. For firms that distribute physical or PDF copies of models (board packs, deal books, audit documentation), this eliminates yet another round of manual tweaking.

Version control

Styles evolve. When your firm updates its brand colors, you update the Model Style once. Future models use the new colors automatically. You can also version your styles — keeping the previous standard available for models that are already in circulation while new models adopt the updated look.

Available Today

Model Styles are available now for all Viete users. If you're on a team plan, styles are shared across your workspace automatically.

To get started:

1. Upload an existing spreadsheet that represents your formatting standard — or describe your ideal style in plain language
2. Review and name the generated Model Style
3. Set it as your default — every model you generate from now on follows your standard

For teams that have spent years building and maintaining formatting standards through institutional knowledge, style guides pinned in Slack channels, and "use this file as a template" instructions — Model Styles captures all of that knowledge in a single, enforceable, reusable definition.

Your spreadsheets should look like they came from your team. Now they will. Every time.