Cells in Excel can be formatted in many different ways. One way to format a cell is to align the contents of the cell horizontally or to indent the contents to the left or the right by a specified amount.

This is similar to the indenting done in a word processor, such as Word. The difference is that the indenting done in cells in Excel is specified by a number of characters, not by a linear distance such as inches or points. You can also align the content vertically within the cell.

To horizontally indent a cell in Excel, select the cell containing the content you want to indent.

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Make sure the Home tab is active on the ribbon.

Selecting the Home tab

In the Alignment section of the Home tab, click the small button in the lower-right corner of the section to open the Format Cells dialog box with the Alignment tab active.

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On the Alignment tab, select an option from the Horizontal drop-down list in the Text alignment section.

Horizontal alignment options

The options in the Horizontal drop-down list labeled with “(Indent)” are meant to indent the text from the left, right, or distributed. Distributed is similar to the Justify option. The text is justified between the margins of the cell, stretching the text out to fit the space, as illustrated below. The different between Distributed (Indent) and Justify, is that an indent value is applied to the content to create a margin on each side of the content.

Distributed indent alignment

Enter the amount you want to index the content in the Indent edit box or use the up and down arrow buttons to select a value. You can enter a value from 0 to 250, inclusive.

Setting the Indent value

If you want to align the content in the cell vertically, select an option from the Vertical drop-down list.

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Here’s an example of text horizontally aligned using a left indent with a value of 2 and centered, vertically.

Contents realigned

The vertical alignment feature is useful in tables where some columns have text that wraps, making the row height bigger, and some columns that don’t. For columns with only one line of text, you can center the text vertically to make it look more consistent.

by Lori Kaufman