Another extremely commonly used option for adjusting the flow of text is merging cells. This lets you tell a spreadsheet to treat two or more adjacent cells as a single cell.

An alternative to text wrapping is text shrinking. You can do this manually by changing the font size, but if you need to do multiple cells in multiple sizes that can get really tedious really quickly.

Text wrapping is basically just a choice between moving text that is wider than the cell down to another line, or keeping it all on the same line whether it’s visible or not. If you turn text wrapping on, most… Read moreFormatting elements: Alignment (About text wrapping)

During the last couple of weeks I discussed horizontal and vertical alignment, and this week I’m going to discuss cell margins.  I’ve grouped them together like this becaue all three of these things affect the text’s relationship with the borders of the cell…. Read moreFormatting elements: Alignment (About cell margins)

Last week I discussed horizontal alignment, and this week I’ll discuss vertical alignment.  Next week I’ll cover cell margins, which is the third of the three things which affect how the text in a cell relates to the borders of… Read moreFormatting elements: Alignment (About vertical alignment)

This week I’ll discuss horizontal alignment. Horizontal alignment can pretty much always be left, right, or centered.  Some spreadsheets might also offer full alignment, where the text is spaced out to fill the entire width of the cell.

In a spreadsheet, alignment is basically how the text is positioned in the cell.  There are four main aspects to alignment: horizontal alignment, vertical alignment, text wrapping, and cell merging.  There are also additional possibilities that some spreadsheets might support,… Read moreFormatting elements: Alignment (How to)

There’s actually some pretty useful things you can do using borders, although only some of them are useful in tables.

Last week I talked about the do’s and don’ts of borders formatting in tables, and this week I’m going to talk about how to actually format the borders of a cell in various programs.

If you use only one kind of formatting on a table, make it the borders. The borders are the lines around the cell . Like the borders around a comic strip, lines around a table give it visual definition, and… Read moreFormatting elements: Borders (About)