Microsoft Excel is not a word processor, so we don’t expect too much of it in terms of text alignment. However, the program contains a surprising number of options for controlling the way in which data is displayed within a cell.
The alignment section of the Home Tab of the Excel ribbon contains a number of options relating to the way in which your data is position within the cell. Perhaps the most familiar and the most frequently used buttons in this section are the three relating to the horizontal position your data: left, centre and right. However you’ll notice that when you click in the cells of an unformatted worksheet, none of these three icons is highlighted, which indicates that none of them is the default. The reason for this is that Excel treats data differently depending on the data type.
Haven chosen one type of horizontal alignment, you can change it in two ways. You can either choose a different alignment or you can click again on the already selected alignment to deactivate it. For example, if your text is right-aligned and you click on the Right-align button a second time, this will deactivate right alignment and return you to the default alignment which, for text, is left-aligned. So, in fact, Excel has four types of horizontal alignment: left, centre, right and unspecified (or default), which is the alignment that applies when none of the alignment buttons is highlighted.
Excel also allows you to specify vertical alignment. This setting normally only becomes apparent when you increase the height of the cell and this time there is a definite default which is that text is aligned at the bottom of the cell. This setting applies to text, dates and numbers alike.
To set the vertical alignment, either make a selection or click on the row number to select the entire row then click on one of the buttons to make the change: align middle, align top and so forth.
To change vertical alignment, either make a selection or click on the row number to select the entire row then click on one of the buttons to make the change: align middle, align top and so forth.
Having changed the orientation of the headings, you can probably make the columns much narrower. Excel offers a very useful way of doing this: simply select all the columns that contain data then in the Cell group of the Home Tab of the Excel Ribbon, choose Format and then AutoFit Columns. This option makes each of the highlighted columns no wider than it needs to be to display all the data it contains.
When you change the angle of text in this way, the height of the cell increases automatically to accommodate the rotated text. You may also occasionally want to increase the height of cells to enable you to display several lines of text. By default, Excel will only display text on one line, regardless of the height of the cell. To get text to wrap within the cell, click on the Wrap Text button in the Alignment group of the Home Tab of the Excel ribbon.
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