From the course: Excel 2016: Advanced Formatting Techniques

Create angled text variations for greater variety and readability

From the course: Excel 2016: Advanced Formatting Techniques

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Create angled text variations for greater variety and readability

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- We're looking at a worksheet called Angled Text. You can take text typically in titles and angle it. What's the reason, the rationale? Just more interesting, possibly. Sometimes there could be some reasons for saving a little bit of space. I think in this example we're about to see that's not the case. We might just want to slant this data. We get to this feature in the Alignment Group on the Home tab, Orientation button, you see Angle Counterclockwise, Angle Clockwise. The first choice is the more common than Angle Clockwise. This will look a little different if we had used full spellings. We can also, as we highlight the data again, come back and reconsider some other options here. It seems everybody tries Vertical Text maybe once, and then maybe not very often later. Not so good. Suppose we have a situation where we have a two- or three-letter code, that wouldn't be so bad, but it's pretty difficult to read. And it does make the column very tall, too. A better option along the same lines, though, would be Rotate Text Up, and in some cases although none of them likely, Rotate Text Down. They certainly do not take up as much space as what we saw before. If you want to simply return to normal, just re-click or click again that option you currently have in place, like this. Now one other aspect of this, too, that can get interesting, is it's more likely to be a show-off feature if we're using full spellings here. So I'll type the full spelling of the month January. and then drag that still handle rightward into June, and then highlight these cells again, and use that Angle Text, Angle Counterclockwise. If we apply one of two border features here, it could be more interesting. So these cells are still highlighted. I'm going to click the Drop Arrow here for the Border Features on the Home tab and choose All Borders, and we get this look. Now I can turn that off by pressing Control-Z. You see the difference there, Control-Y is to repeat it. The border effect it will have here probably isn't typical, it's a thicker border, but you can use different Border styles as you wish. If you want to change that, you could come back here by way of More Borders, and the last time I used this it was a double border. I want a thinner thick line border, or even thinner that the one over here. So different choices there, but the main idea here is you apply these, it gives a different look to that slanted data there. So that can be viable in some situations. Now there's another option here for slanting text, and you can use it whether you have the border features or not. It makes no difference. And that's by way of the Format Cells that we can activate by going to the button just to the right of Alignment here, in the Alignment Group. This is called the Dialog Box Launcher. You can also get to the same location we're about to see by way of Control-1. Format Cells Dialog Box. The Alignment tab isn't always active, so in some cases you will have to click it, but off to the right we've got another way to control the angled text. This looks like half of a clock. We can drag this red diamond to different locations here. We can type in a number down here. If I click OK for the moment, we'll see a 30 degree rotation. That could be better in some cases, possibly. Going back in there at the end, this time by way of Control-1. Get back in here again, the cells are still highlighted. We can drag this up or down. We could use this option here that we saw before that was not so great. We can type in a number here. We can also click the arrows to the right here, and try some variations. So another approach could be, let's see what this looks like at fifty degrees or 55 degrees, something like that. How's that looking? Let's see how that looks. Maybe OK, maybe not. So different ways of using Angled Text. Again, not a heavy duty use, but something you use at different times to give your worksheets a little more flair, a little more visual interest by way of angling the text.

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