Excel Alignment Group Commands

 

This tutorial covers all of the buttons in the Excel Alignment group

The Alignment group is located on the Home tab.  It contains options for aligning your text vertically and horizontally, rotating text, increasing and decreasing indenting, word wrap and merging cells.

Buttons	Description
	Vertical Alignment – These buttons are for aligning your text to the top of the cell, the middle of the cell and the bottom of the cell in that order.
	This is the Orientation button. Clicking on this button brings up options for selecting the angle and direction of the text within a cell
	Wrap Text – Used for wrapping your data across multiple lines within a cell
	Horizontal Alignment – These buttons are for aligning your text to the left side of a cell, to the middle of a cell, and to the right side of a cell in that order.
	The first button is for decreasing the amount of indentation in a cell. The second button is used for increasing the amount of indentation in a cell.
	This button provides options for merging cells, merging and centering cells, and unmerging cells

Excel Fitting More Text in a Cell

Excel provides three options for fitting more data into a cell.

• Word Wrapping – Text automatically wraps to the next line
• Shrink to Fit – Shrinks the size of the cells contents so that they fit within the cell
• Merge Cells – Merge multiple cells into a single cell

Excel Word Wrapping

If your text doesn’t fit within a cell you might want to break up the text on to multiple lines. Setting Word Wrap on will format the cell so that the text wraps automatically. You can also force a line break to occur wherever you want by pressing ALT+ENTER.
You can turn word wrap on by selecting the cell(s) you want to automatically word wrap then click on the Home tab in the ribbon.  In the Alignment group click on the Wrap Text button.

Note:  When word wrap is turned on data in the cell wraps to fit the column width. When you change the column width, data wrapping adjusts automatically.

Excel Shrink to Fit

Turning on the Shrink to Fit option will shrink the cell’s contents so that they will fit within the size of the cell.   If you enter very much text, it may become too small to see unless you expand the width of the cell.   The Shrink to fit option is located on the Alignment tab of the Format Cells Dialog Box.   There are several ways to bring this up.    One way is to click on the Dialog Box Launcher of the Alignment group then select the Alignment tab.

The Shrink to Fit option can be turned on or off by adding or removing the check mark in front of the Shrink to Fit text.  Notice that there is an option for turning on Wrap text here as well.

Example of Shrink to Fit
Before using Shrink to fit
After Using Shrink to fit

Excel Merge and Unmerge Cells

You can join multiple cells to make one larger cell by using one of the three different options for merging cells.

• Merge & Center
• Merge Across
• Merge Cells

The Merge & Center option merges the selected cells and then centers the data horizontally in the new expanded cell.  The Merge & Center button is located on the Home Tab in the Alignment group.  Place your cursor over the Merge & Center button and you will see the following description.

You can improve the look of your spreadsheet by making your heading centered across the width of your worksheet. Look at the example below. The heading has been entered into cell A1. The heading would look better if it were centered across columns A through F.

The Merge & Center command merges the cells you select into a single cell and then centers the data within that cell. If you merge cells A1, B1, C1, D1, E1 and F1 you will end up with one cell that takes up the space of all six cells. The single cell will have an address of A1.

The Merge and Center commands lets you merge cells that are not only adjacent horizontally but vertically as well. Even though you can merge cells that are vertically adjacent the Merge and Center command is usually used for creating labels that expand multiple columns or to span a heading over a report. All of the Merge options can be accessed by clicking on the down arrow to the right of the Merge & Center button.

The Merge Across option can only merge cells that are horizontally adjacent.  It does not center the text.
The Merge Cells option can merge cells that are horizontally or vertically adjacent.  Like the Merge Across option it does not center the text.
You can Unmerge cells by selecting the cells you want to unmerge and then click on the Unmerge Cells option.

Excel Aligning Text in a Cell

Vertical and Horizontal Alignment

	Vertical Alignment – These buttons are for aligning your text to the top of the cell, the middle of the cell and the bottom of the cell in that order.
	Horizontal Alignment – These buttons are for aligning your text to the left side of a cell, to the middle of a cell, and to the right side of a cell in that order.

Increasing and Decreasing Indentation of text in a cell

	Decrease Indent – used to decrease the amount of indentation in the cell
	Increase Indent – used to increase the amount of indentation in the cell

Rotate Text in Excel

Clicking on the orientation button displays a list of options for rotating your text. These are self-explanatory. If you want to get more specific of how your text should be rotated select the last option Format Cell Alignment. This option displays the Alignment tab on the Format Cells dialog box.

The Orientation section on the Alignment tab is for setting the angle of your text.

The angle can be set by dragging the line up or down or by setting the degrees. If you enter the number of degrees Excel automatically adjusts the line and vice versa. Moving the line up from 0 degrees makes the text display from bottom to top. Moving the line down from 0 degrees makes the text display from top to bottom. If you are entering the degrees and you want your text to display top to bottom, you will need to enter a negative value. Clicking on the word Text in the left box puts the text in a completely vertical format. Note: When you rotate text, the size of the cell automatically adjusts to fit the rotated text.

Additional Options for Aligning Vertically and Horizontally

There are other options on the Alignment tab of the Format Cells dialog box for Horizontal and Vertical alignment.  Some of these are the same as those that appear on the Alignment group of the Home Tab, but here you have additional options such as the ability to set the amount of indention for the Left, Right, and Distributed horizontal alignments by using the Indent numerical text box.

The Distributed horizontal alignment uses an equal amount of indention on both sides of the cell text.  Therefore if you enter 3 for the Indent the cell will have three blanks spaces to the left and to the right of whatever is entered in the cell.

The Justify horizontal alignment option is only useful when you are entering multiple lines of text in a cell. Excel justifies each line except the last line by adjusting the space between words so that the text spreads completely from the left to the right borders of the cell.