For this lesson you need to open the sample file: Sales Week Ended 14th March 2008-4 from your Samples Files Folder.
We're going to begin this lesson by inserting three blank rows above Row 1. You learned how to do this in Lesson 3-1. I click on the Row 1 Row Header and then drag down to Row 3. I then right click inside the selected rows and select Insert from the Shortcut Menu.
Now I'm going to add a title to my worksheet. I think a good title for this worksheet would be: Sales Week Ended 14th March 2008.
The title cell doesn't look bad, but wouldn't it be nice to center it above the transactions listed beneath? You could simply copy and paste the title text into cell D1 but that wouldn't be perfectly central. The solution is to merge cells A1 to G1 so that they turn into one big cell. It will then be possible to center the text inside the merged cell.
Here's how to do that. I'll select cells A1 to G1 and then Home on the Ribbon and, in the Alignment group, Merge & Center. When I click Merge & Center, cells A1 to G1 turn into one big cell and the text is centered within that big cell.
The worksheet now looks a lot better, but there's still a problem with this worksheet and that's the text in cell A22. You can see that I can't read all of the text because it's scrolling off the screen.
One solution would be to use the Scroll Bar buttons at the bottom of the screen to scroll to the right, and then I would be able to read all of the text.
Another solution would be to make A22 the active cell, and then read the description in the Formula Bar.
You can see that the Formula Bar isn't quite wide enough to read all of the text, but notice that there's a Formula Bar Expand button on the right hand side of the Formula Bar. If I click the Formula Bar Expand button, the Formula Bar gets deeper and now I'm able to read all of the text. And if there was even more text in cell A22, I could hover the mouse cursor over the bottom of the Formula Bar and then click and drag to make it as deep as I wanted it to be.
When you've finished reading the text, you can collapse the Formula Bar using the Collapse button in the top right corner. I'll click the Collapse button now so you can see I can expand, collapse, expand, collapse, by clicking the same button.
But even reading the text using the Formula Bar isn't an ideal solution. I'd like to be able to read all of the text at the bottom of the worksheet, without having to scroll and without having to expand and collapse the Formula Bar. I think it would be a good idea to merge cells A22 to G22, and then make Row 22 a lot deeper. I should then be able to read all of the text.
So I'll select cells A22 to G22 and then click Home on the Ribbon. And in the Alignment group, notice that the Merge & Center button is actually a split button, with Merge & Center at the left and a dropdown arrow at the right.
So I'll click the dropdown arrow to see the other options and you can see that I can simply merge the cells without centering them. And that's what I want in this case because I'd still like the text to remain horizontally aligned to the left.
So I'll click Merge Cells and now I'll make Row 22 a lot deeper. You'll remember that you learned how to do this in Lesson 2-9. I hover the mouse cursor over the intersection of Rows 22 and 23 and then click and drag downwards to make the row a lot deeper.
Well I can see that there's now enough space in the cell for all of the text but the text is still only appearing on one line. It needs to appear on multiple lines in order to read all of it.
In order to make the text appear on multiple lines, we need to make the text wrap. That means that when it gets to the right hand side of the cell, the text will continue on the second line, and then the third, and the fourth, until all of the text is displayed.
To make the text wrap, I click Home tab on the Ribbon and, in the Alignment group, notice there's a Wrap Text button. I'll click Wrap Text now, and you can see that all of the text is now visible on the screen.
The job isn't quite complete, because you can see that the text is vertically aligned to the bottom of cell A22 and we'd probably want it aligned to the top. You're going to learn how to do that in the next lesson, Lesson 4-7.
But for the moment all that remains is save your work. And we'll save with the new name: Sales Week Ended 14th March 2008-5. And as usual, I'll save to the folder above my Sample Files Folder.
I click the Save button and you've now completed Lesson 4-6: Merge Cells, Wrap Text and Expand/Collapse the Formula Bar.