Rotate Text in Excel to add a creative and functional touch to your spreadsheets, making them more visually appealing and space-efficient. Whether you’re aiming to fit more text into a narrow column, create distinctive headers, or simply want to add stylistic flair to your reports, mastering text rotation is key. This guide will provide you with a comprehensive overview of how to effectively rotate text in Excel, offering a variety of angles and orientations to choose from. By incorporating this skill into your Excel toolkit, you’ll not only enhance the aesthetic quality of your spreadsheets but also improve their readability and layout, making your data more accessible and engaging.
There are various techniques to make the text more appealing and formatted to the reader’s preferences. Excel’s text rotation feature is one such method.
When you have a large heading and a little number, it is extremely helpful (as shown below). Due to their slant, the headers in Row 1 take up less space in this example (as compared to when they are horizontal).
I’ll demonstrate how to easily rotate text in Excel in this tutorial, step by step.
This Tutorial Covers:
- Using the Ribbon Alignment Options, rotate text
- Using the Ribbon Format Cells Dialog Box, rotate text
- Rotate Text in Excel Using a Shortcut on the Keyboard
- Transform the text so that it is once again horizontal (Default State)
1. Using the Ribbon Alignment Options, rotate text
Let’s say you wish to rotate the first row of headings in a dataset like the one below.
How to rotate text in the cells is in below:
Step 1: Choose every cell that has the headers you want to rotate in excel.
Step 2: Click the “Home” tab and then select the “Orientation” icon in the “Alignment” group. In the options that show up, choose the “Angle Counterclockwise” option.
By following the steps above, the text in the chosen cells would rotate by 45 degrees.
Additionally, you have the choice to select Rotate Text Up or Angle Clockwise. Although there are additional choices, I don’t utilize them (and not sure if anyone does).
Although there are few possibilities, this is an easy approach to rotate text in a cell. What if, for instance, you want the angle of rotation to be somewhat higher than 45 degrees? (say 60 degrees).
You can do that too, but you’ll need to use the method that follows, which is detailed in this lesson.
2. Using the Ribbon Format Cells Dialog Box, rotate text
You need to click a few more times, but it takes a little longer and provides you with much more control.
Let’s say you wish to rotate the first row of headings in a dataset like the one below.
If you want to rotate the text using Ribbon Format Cells Dialog Box, follow the steps below:
Step 1: Choose every cell that has the headers you want to rotate.
Step 2: Click the “Home” tab and then select the “Orientation” icon in the “Alignment” group. In the options that show up, choose the “Format Cells Alignment” option.
Step 3: Enter the angle by which you wish the text to be rotated in the orientation area. Clicking OK will close the dialog window.
The result looks like below:
The appropriate alignment can also be obtained by using the mouse to click on the red dot in the Orientation option.
Also Read: How to Calculate Standard Deviation in Excel?
3. Rotate Text in Excel Using a Shortcut on the Keyboard
Getting accustomed to the shortcut for rotating the text could save you time if you need to do it frequently.
How to make Excel cells text rotate is shown below.
Step 1: Choose every cell that has the headers you want to rotate.
Step 2: Use the following keyboard shortcut to rotate the text in the chosen cells:
ALT + H + F + Q + O (press one after the other)
After entering the shortcut, the outcome will be shown immediately, as shown below.
Even though it’s a lengthy keyboard shortcut, it’s still the quickest method if you frequently need to utilize this setting.
Also Read: How to Count Characters in Excel?
4. Transform the text so that it is once again horizontal (Default State)
You must return and turn off the current setting if you want to get rid of the rotated text and get the standard horizontal text back (which you can do by clicking on the same option in the ribbon again).
For instance, go to the same option and click on the text again if you have it set to Angle Counterclockwise (it works as a toggle).
Alternatively, you can use the Alignment dialog box (the second technique described in this video), where the orientation degrees should be set to 0.
These are a few techniques for swiftly rotating text in Excel.
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