Formatting text using the Ribbon

Formatting text in “Microsoft Excel” is similar to 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) we want to format.

If not selected, select the “Home” tab in the “Ribbon”.

To set the “Font size”, we click the downward pointing black arrow:

“Live examples” are present from the Excel 2007 version onwards. In this case, when your mouse pointer slides over the different font sizes it automatically displays a preview of it in the “Worksheet”. Click a “Font size” when you are satisfied.

The same live preview option also works for the “Font”, “Fill color” and “Font color”.

We also have options like “Bold”, “Italic”, “Underline”, and “Increase Font Size” and “Decrease Font Size”.

At the “Underline” command, we have two possibilities when we press the arrow: “Underline” (which is the default setting) or “Double underline”. Clicking the “Increase Font Size” and “Decrease font size” buttons increase or decrease 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 “TopAlign”, ” Middle Align” and ” Bottom Align”. We use it to align the text vertically. Depending on the height of the row, this will place the text at the top, middle, or bottom in aligning the cell contents.

The three commands below the first lever are “Align text Left”, “Center” and “Align text Right”.  We use these commands to align the text horizontally, in our cells.

The next two commands are to increase or decrease the indentation of the text. Each time you click, it resizes the indentation.

We also have the “Wrap Text” and “Orientation” buttons, which will be discussed in detail later.

Wrap Text

When you type in a cell that is longer than the width of the cell, the text will overflow to the adjacent cell as long as the next cell contains no information. When the adjacent cell contains data, the data of the first cell will not be completely visible in our “Spreadsheet”.

One solution is to adjust the column width, which we have seen in a previous lesson but, a second solution is using the “Wrap Text” command. When we click this button, this will make all of the text in the cell visible, by placing them in different rows.

Clicking this button again, this will undo the wrap.

 

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