Changing the Horizontal & Vertical Alignment of Excel Cell Contents

The video guide shows to shift text from the top to bottom of a cell, and from left to right by adjusting a cell's horizontal and vertical alignment. If the text does not shift as anticipated, it may be that someone has tried to align text manually by adding spaces before or after the rest of the text.

The alignment buttons on the Home ribbon are effectively shortcuts to access the Horizontal/Vertical dropdown lists in the Alignment tab of the Format Cells menu. On those menus, you will see Excel also lets you select justified or distributed text alignments, where individual lines within block text will fill across a page. If a block of text is long enough that you need to use justified alignments, our experts would recommend housing the block of text in a separate textbox. It is easier to format portions of extended text in a textbox.

A further question is whether you should change Excel's default alignments. Vertically aligning text to the bottom rarely makes sense for tables of data because it is visually simpler to glance across the top of a row. To change the default to top alignment, you would need to open a blank workbook, modify its default styles, and save it as a new template in the XLSTART folder on your machine. We recommend not doing this because, in a lot of workbooks, the vertical alignment will be irrelevant (as it only comes into play when rows exceed one line in height) and no single default will ever work everywhere.

By Ed Bolton, founder of Excel4Business Ltd. Last reviewed October 2026.