Angling for Column Labels

McChris — Tue, 02 Sep 2008 20:09:47 +0000

Have you ever wanted to put the labels for table columns at an angle like in the image below? I’ve been working on a project where I wanted to do that, and I wasn’t sure Excel had that capability. I poked around online for instructions, and, although I figured it out, none of the tutorials are very good. Here is my effort to provide a how-to on setting column headings at an angle. The example I’m using is course evaluations from an imaginary media-studies department.

Select the cells with the column labels you would like to angle. I did a drag selection to angle them all at once.
Right-click on the selected cells, and click “Format Cells.”
In the dialog box, click “Alignment.”
On the right-hand side of the dialog, there should be an area labeled “Orientation.”
In the entry box labeled, “Degrees,” enter the number of degrees you want to angle the text. I used 45°
Click “OK,” and your labels should be angled.
You’ll probably want to take two more steps. First you’ll want to left justify the cells below the angled labels, so the text lines up correctly. Select the cells, open Format Cells=>Alignment=>Text Alignment and set Horizontal alignment to Left. (You don’t want to indent.)
Finally, you’ll want to shrink the overall column width, which is the whole point of angling your labels. Select all of the columns, right-click to open “Column Width” and experiment with column widths until it looks the way you want it. Excel will overflow the angled labels over into the next column

I hope this is more clear than some of the other Excel tutorials out there. It really isn’t that hard, but what is hard is finding what dialog allows you do to this. It’s “Format Cells.” For the record, I’m suing Office 2004 for OS X, so your version of Excel may be slightly different.

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Angling for Column Labels