Saturday, February 19, 2005

Using text in Excel

One of my pet hates is people who use Excel as a wordprocessor. I often have to fix up problems caused by errant spaces left in cells.

However Excel does have some useful wordprocessing abilities that can come in handy. If I have to produce text together with graphs, tables of data etc then I prefer to use Excel than Word, even though Word has far superior desk top processsing abilities. If the data is not going to change I tend to copy and paste into Word but if it is to be dynamic than I don't like to link it live as its not hard for the links to go screwy.

In Excel you can wrap text in a cell, Merge cells together to make larger cells (be careful doing this), and align text vertically and horizontally. Use the Format Cells Alignment tab to do this.
You can also justify text within a range. Use Edit | Fill | Justify for this.
Spell check is also available - F7.


Posted by: Jethro | 10:12 PM |