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That’s all you need to remember to start rotating text in Microsoft Excel. This will show the text so that each character takes up one line. If you want to align a cell’s text vertically, you can click the “Vertical Text” option under the Orientation drop-down list.
Is there a way to vertically align text?. You may also use your mouse to drag the interactive compass to your preferred angle. There is an input field where you can indicate the exact angle you want the text to be presented. Users can select the Format Cells option to get an advanced menu for formatting text. Is there a way to set arbitrary angles for text orientation?. You can quickly pull up this dialog box using the shortcut Ctrl + 1. Your cell range should now have their text back to normal.Īlternatively, you may also set the orientation Angle to 0 degrees in the Format Cells dialog box. Select the range with rotated text and click the predefined option you have clicked on earlier. First, you can disable orientation options if you use one of the pre-defined orientations. To undo the text rotation, there are a few options you can use. Selecting the clockwise option should return something similar to the table below. Your range should now have rotated text, as seen below. In this example, we’ll first angle our text in a counterclockwise direction. Excel offers 5 different alignment options to change your cell’s text direction quickly. Click on the Orientation button to view some options you can choose to orient your text on. You can find this in the Alignment section under the Home tab. In this example, we’ve selected the range B1:G1, which contains our headers for months. First, select the cell range you want to rotate the text on. You’ll learn how we can use Orientation options to determine at what angle text values are displayed.įollow these steps to start rotating text: This section will guide you through each step needed to start rotating text in Excel. If you’re ready to try rotating text yourself in Excel, head over to the next section to learn more. You can make your own copy of the spreadsheet above using the link attached below. In the same amount of space, we placed twice the amount of information after rotating our headers. As seen in the example below, you can easily compress more data without compromising the header visibility. We can rotate the text further to have text written upwards or downwards. We have rotated the headers for each month to decrease the amount of horizontal space used. The table shown below contains the monthly sales of several items in our inventory. Excel supports various angles of rotation and includes some pre-defined orientation options as well.
Let’s take a look at a real example of a spreadsheet that has rotated text.
#How to change text direction in excel how to#
Let’s learn how to use the orientation option ourselves in Excel and later test out the function in an actual sample sheet. Rotating text either diagonally or vertically can help make your spreadsheets more compact and easier to read.
Tables with numerical data can significantly benefit from rotating the header text since it will allow you to use up less of the screen for your table.
With the orientation function, it becomes pretty easy to rotate text in a cell so that you can easily present text in a smaller width column. However, neither of these options allows you to read the text easily. You can either shrink the text or deactivate text wrapping. There are a few options available to improve this setup. If you have a column heading that is longer than the current cell size, users cannot read the entire text, which might make it difficult to read. For easy navigation, you would like to compress the column size so that the entire table fits within the screen. Suppose we have a spreadsheet with multiple columns. Let’s look at a scenario where we might want to rotate text in your spreadsheet.
A Real Example of Rotating Text in Excel.