How to use text orientation in Excel

In this lesson we'll look at how to use text orientation. Orientation allows you to rotate text in a variety of ways.

Let's take a look.

Here we have a simple feature summary table. We can use orientation to spice things up a bit.

Before we do that, however, let's look at what types of orientation are available. Orientation options are in a menu in the Alignment group on the home tab of the ribbon.

There are two basic types of orientation. One type stacks letters on top of one another. This is called Vertical Text in the orientation menu. Vertical Text is either on or off.

In the Format Cells dialog box, Vertical text is the option on the left of the orientation group. Be aware that if you set the Vertical text option from the Format Cells dialog box, Excel will switch Vertical alignment to Bottom alignment with an indent. You can use the indent, or switch Vertical alignment back to Center.

The other type of orientation is rotated. Excel allows you to rotate text up to 90 degrees both clockwise and counterclockwise. There are four fixed settings in the orientation menu for common options.

The last item in the menu brings you into the Format Cells dialog box, where you can make finer grained changes. For example, you can choose an angle other than 45 degrees.

Now let's look at our main table. One common use of rotated text is for column headers. We can select all the headers we want to rotate and apply rotation in one step.

Another possibility for this kind of table is to change the orientation of the categories in column B. We could use Vertical Text. But in general, text rotated 90 degrees counterclockwise will create a cleaner look.

To remove text orientation, just select the cells and select the orientation option again to "toggle" orientation off. You can also visit the Format Cells dialog box and set Degrees to zero.