Page 126 - Excel Timesaving Techniques for Dummies

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21 Dazzling
Alignments for

Technique Data Entries

ost of the time, the Formatting toolbar’s Align Left, Center, Align
Save Time By Right, and Merge and Center buttons are all you need to put your
Mspreadsheet’s data entries into good order. You should, however,
Using unusual horizontal
and vertical alignments keep in mind that Excel has much more to offer than these four standard
formatting buttons when it comes to properly aligning and orienting your
Indenting data entries data.
Wrapping text within
cells Using these other less standard alignment options can often go a long way
towards making the tables in your spreadsheet read better by enabling you
Centering an entry across to keep their data more compact in their columns. More importantly, they
cells can save you from later having to waste time dealing with paging problems
caused by tables that unnecessarily split across more than one page of
the report.

This technique looks at several of these less standard alignment options
that you can apply to both text and numeric entries in the tables in your
spreadsheets. It also covers text options that enable you to efficiently
format long text entries such as the titles and column and row headings
for your tables.

Line Me Up

The Alignment tab of the Format Cells dialog box (opened by pressing
Ctrl+1 — see Figure 21-1) contains four sections with options that enable
you to control the positioning of the data entries in their cells:

Text Alignment to change the horizontal and vertical alignment of the
entries in their cells. In addition to the normal left, center, and right
horizontal alignment, you have a choice between using left or right
indent, filling the cell with the characters in the entry, justifying the
characters to fill the width of the cell, and centering the entry across a
selection of cells.
Vertical alignment options include aligning the entries with the top edge
of the cells, bottom edge, or centered between the two edges. Or you
can wrap the entry on different lines that are either justified between
the top and bottom cell edges or evenly distributed between the two.