You may have noticed in Excel that text is aligned to the left and numbers are aligned to the right. It's a standard. It helps us to read tables. However, if we want to start playing around with those, then we can, if we go up to the home ribbon in the alignment section, we can firstly change our vertical alignment. I'm going to select row four and increase the height of that row so we can see the different vertical alignment options. We can align to the top, we can align to the middle and we can align to the bottom.

We can also align horizontally so we can align left, align, center, or align right. I'm going to put it back to Align left.

If you've got a heading, for example in D4 and then you've got items underneath that heading and you want to make it obvious that they relate to the heading above, you can use the indent buttons to increase the indent. If you keep pressing the button, it indents more. If you realize you've gone too far or you wanna indent in the other direction, you click on the decrease indent button.

It may be the case that you want to merge two cells together. I'm going to delete the word name and instead I would like the word transaction to be merged across cells C4 and D4. I go up to the alignment section and we have various options for merging. If I click on the dropdown, I'm going to select merge and center, and the word transaction now appears in the center of cells C4 and D4. You could also align left or right. I'm going to keep that as aligned center. You may sometimes find that your titles extend out to the right hand side of a cell, in which case you may want to wrap Text wrap. Text will keep it within the column, so if in cell B5, I had March and April, I can see the right hand side is being cut off. If I go up to the alignment section of the ribbon and I click on the wrap text button, we can see that that has now been contained within the column width. However, the text Is still too big vertically for our cell. In order to auto adjust the cell height, I can go to row five and just double click at the bottom of that row to autofit the row height. If I'm finding that all of these options are not quite enough, I can click on the options arrow in the bottom right hand corner and I get the alignment dialogue box. Here we have got horizontal and vertical alignment options. We've got indent, we have got wrap text, which you can see. We have already selected merge cells, text direction and orientation that we can control by degrees. To show you the orientation without having to go into the dialogue box, I click on the cell. I want to orientate slightly differently. I go up to the orientation button, click on the dropdown and select, for example, angle counterclockwise. This can be particularly useful if you've got a large number of columns, but you want to try and keep them all on the screen. You can change the orientation so that it is vertical and you get very tall, thin labels all written vertically, and now you can squeeze many more columns onto your screen.