The alignment section of the Home Tab of the Excel 2007 ribbon is home to a number of options relating to the way in which your data is position within the cell. The most familiar and most frequently used icons in this section are the three relating to the horizontal position your data: left, centre and right. However you’ll notice that when you activate the cells of an unformatted worksheet, none of the three alignment icons is highlighted. This indicates that none of them is the default. The reason for this is that Excel treats data alignment differently depending on the data type.
If you type text in a cell, your text is aligned on the left; if you type a number, the number is aligned on the right; if you type a date, it is also aligned on the right. To set the horizontal alignment, you can either select a range of cells or click on a column letter to highlight the entire column then click on one of the alignment icons.
Haven chosen one type of horizontal alignment, you can change it in two ways. You can either choose a different alignment or you can click again on the already selected alignment to deactivate it. For example, if your text is right-aligned and you click on the Right-align button a second time, this will deactivate right alignment and return you to the default alignment which, for text, is left-aligned. So, in fact, Excel has four types of horizontal alignment: left, centre, right and unspecified (or default), which is the alignment that applies when none of the alignment buttons is highlighted.
Microsoft Excel also allows you to specify the vertical alignment of your text. This setting becomes apparent when you increase the height of the cell and there is a definite default; text is normally aligned at the bottom of the cell. This default vertical alignment applies to text, dates and numbers alike.
To set the vertical alignment, either make a selection or click on the row number to select the entire row then click on one of the buttons to make the change: align middle, align top and so forth.
Excel also features the ability to change the orientation of text within the cell. This is particularly useful in those situations where your column headings are wider than the data in the cells. To change the vertical orientation of your text, just select the cells in question and then choose the appropriate angle in the Alignment dialogue.
If you rotate your column headings by 90 degrees, you can usually make the columns much narrower. Excel has a very useful way of doing this: simply select all the columns that contain data then in the Cell group of the Home Tab of the Excel Ribbon, choose Format then AutoFit Columns. This command makes each of the highlighted columns no wider than it needs to be in order to display all the data it contains.
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