Formatting text using the “Ribbon”

The formatting of text in “Microsoft Excel” is similar to the formatting in “Microsoft Word”.

The commands in the “Font” group and the “Alignment” group, are nearly identical with the commands in the “Font” group and the “Paragraph” group, in “Microsoft Word”.
To format cells or cell ranges we first select the cell (s).
If not selected, select the “Home” tab in the “Ribbon”.
To set the font size, we click the black downward pointing arrow:

New in “Excel 2007” is the Live Preview option.
When you move your mouse pointer over the different font sizes preview is displayed automatically in the worksheet.
Click a font size when you are satisfied.
The same also works with Live Preview Option for “Font”,”Fill color”, and “Font color”.

We also have “Bold”, “Italic”, “Underline”, “Increase font size” and “Decrease font size” commands.
We have two options for the “Underline” command:
“Single underline” (which is the default setting) and “Double underline”.
Clicking the “Increase Font Size” and “Decrease font size” buttons will increase or decrease the font size by 2 pixels.

Alignment of Data

In addition to the “Font” group we find the “Alignment” group with 11
command buttons.
The first three are “Top Align”, “Centre Align” and “Bottom Align”.
We use it to align the text vertically.
Depending on the height of the row, this will align the text at the top, middle, or at the bottom of the cell.
The three commands below are “Align Text Left”, “Align Text Center” and “Align Text Right”.
We use it to align the text horizontally in our cells.

We have two more buttons to increase or decrease the indentation of the text. Each time you click these,the indentation is increased or reduced.
Then we have the “Wrap Text” and “Orientation” buttons, which we will discuss next in this chapter.

Wrap Text

When you type text in a cell which is longer than the width of the cell, the text will overflow to the adjacent cell as long as it contains no information. When the adjacent cell has data, the data of the first cell will not completely appear in our spreadsheet.
One solution is to adjust the column width, as we have seen in a previous lesson, but a second solution, using the “Wrap Text”.
When we click this button all the text in the cell is visible by placing it in different rows.

Clicking this button again will undo the wrap.

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