Angled Column Heading

Every time it comes to Column Headings I struggle to get meaningful text into such a small box.

There are a few approaches I’ve used:

  • Widen this Column just for sake of the heading
  • Double the Row Height, widen the Column a bit then Word Wrap
  • Widen the Column just enough to let Shrink To Fit do the rest
  • Abbreviate the heading, put the long version in a cell comment
  • A little while ago I starting rotating the Column Heading text as a way to save space…

  • 90° Text Orientation - get the column as narrow as possible
  • I’ve settled on a less extreme Text Orientation, like 30°.

    But what is really great about Text Orientation is the way Vertical Borders react - they go angled too!

    I think the borders really help to guide a user from the column heading the column values.

    It would be interesting to know what you do when it comes to formatting headings… Click Comments and let us know!

    6 Comments

    1. William Tan Hernowo says:

      This is actually great for presentation purposes,
      out of curiosity, i highlighted the cells and what do you know? the colors are angled too!

    2. Andy Pope says:

      I normally go with the increased row height and wrapped text.

      Although I was impressed to see that the sloped cells worked well even when using coloured fills.

    3. ross says:

      angling text in this way can also be useful for charts as an easy way to show all x axis values - even a 1 deg change makes a diffreance.

    4. jjames says:

      It’s not worth the effort. I’ve tried angled text often when I first discovered it, and it mostly came out looking screwy. I just shrink down the text to say 6-8 points in a 10 pt. bodied spreadsheet. This seems to work and doesn’t look that strange.

    5. Jon Peltier says:

      JJames -

      It prints out much nicer than it looks on screen.

      - Jon

    6. Andy says:

      I knew it could be done just forgotten how, at first I found that it wouldn’t work no matter how angled I set the text, then I realised that I had a row of merged cells, unmerged them and worked fine.

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