Getting Oriented in Excel 2010 part 1

The next group in the Home tab is called Alignment, and Alignment commands are likewise considered formatting. These enable  you to position, and reposition, the data you’ve entered in their cells (Figure 4–33):

The lower-left buttons in the group are rather simple and commonly used, and bring about left, center, and right alignments of  the data in the cells you click. That is, click the left alignment button and data will be shunted to the left border of the cell. (Of  course, text is left-aligned by default.) Click the center button, and any data are situated in the middle of their respective cells (Figure 4–34):

Nothing prevents you from centering numbers in their cells, and this alignment decision seems to be a popular one. Users  seem to like the symmetry it affords. Still, I wouldn’t recommend it, and for an obvious reason (Figure 4–35):

You see the problem. Enter numbers of varying widths in the same column, center them, and you’ll thereby misalign the ones,  tens, etc. But remember that alignments, no matter how ornate, won’t change the quality of the data. Those numbers above are  still numbers, and can be subject to exactly the same mathematical treatment as if they are right-aligned.

And while we’re at it, the right-align button rams data to the right border of their cells—which is the default alignment for  numbers, after all. default alignment for numbers, after all. The upper tier of alignment buttons controls a far more exotic set  of possibilities—vertical alignment in cells (Figure 4–36):

If you need your data to look like this (Figure 4–37):

click one of the buttons shown in Figure 4–36. What these do is position data along a vertical axis in the cell—at the bottom of  a cell (the default, when you think about it), in the center (as above), or even at the cell’s ceiling (Figure 4–38):

Just bear in mind that if you apply these formats to cells of normal heights, you won’t see the above effects. That’s because the  default row height is too low to enable these to happen, and so you’ll need to elevate the heights of the rows you want.

How do you do that? The technique is in many ways the right-angled equivalent of the columnwidening methods we described  in chapter 2. In order to raise a row height, click on the row’s lower boundary and drag down (or up, if you want to shrink the row’s height). And if I select several row boundaries at the same time by dragging along the row numbers, releasing the mouse  and then dragging on any selected row boundary, I’ll see something like this (Figure 4–39):

I can then modulate the height of all the selected rows at the same—and they’ll all exhibit the same, new height.

So to achieve the row height you see in Figure 4–40—brought about in cell A10—I simply dragged down on the lower  boundary by the 10 (Figure 4–40):

And once I’ve engineered the desired height I then clicked the Top Align button—and you get your top-of-the-cell number. Of  course as always I can heighten the row first, click Top Align, and then  enter the number. The sequence of clicks doesn’t matter here.