Wednesday, October 20, 2004

Using Excel to display text nicely

Sometimes you may need to have a fair amount of text in a cell or cells. Here are some tips to making that text look nice.

Justify
If you need to use several rows of cells to siplay a fair amount of text then you can use the Edit - Fill - Justify command to make this fit inside the cells.
To do this type all your text in the first cell.
Then select the range of cells you want the text to be spread over.
Select Edit - Fill - Justify and the text will flow down the range of cells and only fill as wide as the selection. Each cell in the first column will contain the text that fills to the width of the selection.
Note some fonts make this print differently to how it appears on the screen when multiple columns are being used.
If you need to edit cells and this changes the amount of text then re-performing the command with the selection will adjust it accordingly.
Note an error message will occur if the justified text will flow below the selected range, allowing you to back out if ncessary as it will other wise over write data in the cells below.

Alignment Wrap Text
You can also format a single cell or range of cells to wrap text within the cell. This row will then automatically adjust (or can be manually adjusted) to fit the depth of text entered.
Select the cell or cells, then Format - Cells select the Alignment tab and choose Wrap Text.
Using ALT + Enter gives you a carriage return or line feed between sentences if necessary.


Posted by: Jethro | 10:54 PM |