You saw that by clicking inside of a cell it makes it active, so that you can make changes. We want to centre all our numbers and the text. Here's the spreadsheet we have:
So we need cells A1, A2, A3 and A4 to be active. In Excel, you can do this by highlighting the cells.
The cells highlighted in the image above have a different colour to the normal white colour of a cell. When you highlight cells, you can do things to all the cells as a group.
To centre the text and numbers in our highlighted cells, try this:
You can see the various alignment options laid out. These ones:
Hold your mouse over each alignment icon and you'll see an explanation of what they do. Click each icon and see what they do to your highlighted cells.
You can also click the arrow in the bottom right of the Alignment panel to bring up the Format Cells box (the one circled below).
When you click the arrow, you'll see this dialogue box:
Notice the Text Alignment section at the top of the Alignment tab. It has two drop down menus, one for Horizontal alignment and one for Vertical alignment.
As you can see, you have plenty of options to choose from in Excel. But click on Center. Do the same for the Vertical drop down menu. Then click OK at the bottom of the Format Cells dialogue box.
The text and numbers in cells A1, A2, A3 and A4 should now be centred, and your spreadsheet will look like the one below:
Before moving on to other types of formatting you can do in Excel, have a try of this:
The number you just entered should also be centered. So even if a cell is empty you can still apply formatting to it.
In the next part, we'll take a look at the various font formatting you can do in Excel 2007 and Excel 2010.