Formatting Text in Excel

How to Format Text in Excel?

Formatting of text in excel includes, color, font name, font size, alignment, font appearance in terms of bold, underline, italic, background color of the font cell, etc.

#1 Text Name

You can format the text font from default to any of the other available fonts in excel. Enter any text value in any of the cells.

Under the HOME tab you can see so many formatting options available.

Formatting has been categorized into 6 groups i.e. Clipboard, Font, Alignment, Number, and Style.

In this, we are formatting the font of cell value A1 i.e. “Hello Excel”.For this under “Font” category click on the drop-down list of “Font Name” and select the font name as you wish.

In the above, I just hover on one of the font names and we can see the immediate preview in cell A1. If you are satisfied with the font style then click on the name to fix the font name for the selected cell value.

#2 Font Size

Similarly, we can format the font size of the text in a cell as well. For this just type the font size in numbers next to the font name option.

Enter the font size in numbers to see the impact.

#3 Text Appearance

We can modify the default view of the text value as well. We can make the text value look bold, italic, and underlined as well. For this just look at font size and name options, you can see all these three options.

As per the format, you can apply formatting on text value.

• We have applied Bold formatting using Ctrl + B shortcut excel key.

• To apply Italic formatting use Ctrl + I shortcut key.

• And to apply Underline formatting use Ctrl + U shortcut key.

• Below image shows a combination of all the above three options.

• Just in case if you want to apply double underline then click on the drop-down list of underline options and choose “Double Underline”.

#4 Text Color

You can format the default font color (black) of text to any of the color available.

• Click on the drop-down list of the “Font Color” option and change as per your wish.

#5 Text Alignment

We can format the alignment of the excel text under the “Alignment” group.

• We can do a left alignment, right alignment, middle alignment, top alignment, and bottom alignment.

#6 Text Orientation

One more important thing under Alignment we can do is “Orientation” of the text value.

Under orientation, we can rotate text values diagonally or vertically.

• Align Counterclockwise

• Align Clockwise

• Vertical Text

• Rotate Text Up

• Rotate Text Down

• And under format cell alignment we can have many other kinds of stuff as well. Click on this option and experiment with some of the techniques to see the impact.

#7 Conditional Text Formatting

Let’s see how to apply conditional formatting to Text in Excel.

We have learned some of the basic text formatting techniques. How about the idea of formatting only a specific set of values from the group or if you want to find only duplicate values or find only unique values.

These are possible through the conditional formatting technique.

For example look at the below list of cities.

From this list let’s learn some formatting techniques.

#1 – Highlight Specific Value

If you want to highlight only the specific city name then we can highlight specific city name only. Assume you want to highlight the city “Bangalore” then select the data and go to conditional formatting.

Click on the drop-down list in excel of Conditional Formatting >>> Highlight cells Rules >>> Text that Contains.

Now we will see below window.

Now enter the text value that we need to highlight.

Now from the dropdown list choose the formatting style.

Click on Ok, it will highlight only the supplied text value.

#2 – Highlight Duplicate Value

In order to highlight duplicate values in excel follow the below path.

Conditional Formatting >>> Highlight cells Rules >>> Duplicate Values.

Again from the below window select the formatting style.

This will highlight only the text values that appear more than once.

#3 – Highlight Unique Value

Like how we have highlighted duplicate values similarly we can highlight all the unique values i.e. “text value that appears only once”.From the duplicate values, formatting window chooses “Unique” value option.

This will highlight only the unique values.

Things to Remember

• Learn shortcut keys to quickly formatting text values in excel.
• Based on certain conditions if you want to format some text values then use conditional formatting.

Recommended Articles

This has been a guide to formatting text in excel. Here we discuss how to format text using text name, font size, text appearance, text color, etc along with practical examples and downloadable excel templates. You may learn more about excel from the following articles –

• Conditional Formatting in Dates
• Conditional Formatting along with Formulas
• Combine Text From Two or More Cells