Justify in Excel

Justified text is common in printing, and you can bring it to Excel spreadsheets too. Justified text expands to fill the available width of a given space. You can use it inside your spreadsheets to create a neater, more even appearance when you have multiple lines of text inside a single cell. Let’s learn how to justify in Microsoft Excel.

How to Justify in Excel

Imagine an Excel spreadsheet with multiple lines of text or numbers inside a single cell, like the one below. This was done by activating Excel’s Wrap Text feature to fit more values inside a cell, by making it taller. As you can see, each line of text has a slightly different width.

Sometimes, it’s stylistically helpful to justify the text. By justifying text, the top lines will be width-adjusted so that they fit together seamlessly. Let’s learn how.

To justify text in Excel, right-click the cell in question. You’ll see a menu appear with several options. Click on Format Cells. 

Another menu appears, and you’ll want to click Alignment at the top. From the Horizontal Alignment dropdown, click Justify. Finally, click OK in the lower right corner.

Excel will justify the text instantly. It does this by widening the spaces between words on each line. Now, the text touches the right side of the cell, rather than stopping short of it.

This is also a smart, dynamic adjustment. If you change the width of the column, Excel will adjust the text to remain justified. You don’t have to apply the alignment setting over and over again to maintain it.

As you can see, it’s easy to justify text in Microsoft Excel. Try this any time you need multiple rows of text or numbers to seamlessly fit the width of the cell they are contained in.