Adjusting Cell Margins (W2K / Excel 2K, SR1)

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Does anyone know how to adjust the cell margins in Excel? By this I mean the distance that the text is set off from the edge of the cell.

In Word, one accomplishes this in a table by Table -> Table Properties -> Options… (see attached GIF).

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Al

Excel has no generic equivalent. However, it does set spacing as follows:

a) in a general format, the spacing is effectively 0
in a numeric format, the character “_” reserves a space to hold a character
e.g _-$* #,##0_-;-$* #,##0_-;_-$* “-“_-;_-@_-
specifies that this number format reserve a space big enough to hold a minus sign in front of the dollar and at the end of the number

In full, the whole string says
* reserve such spaces if the number is positive
* use a real minus in front of the number if negative
* reserve spaces and print a hyphen if zero
* reserve spaces around text

Accordingly, you can specify spacing in a limited way by specifying a custom cell format.

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Format | Cells | Alignment | Indent
is the easiest, but probably too large an indent for you, and only for left alignment. More options in XL2002.

You should be able to use a custom format to get smaller indents:

_-#_X;-#_X

where the width of X is the width of the indent, ie, you can use I for a much smaller indent, but this dosn’t work for me in XL97. HTH –Sam

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Andrew and Sam,

Many thanks for your information and suggestions. I didn’t know about the special space character in Custom format. It looks, however, like it’ll only function as a first_line_indent or a single forced space. Sam, you’re correct even “1” is a pretty large indent.

Now, of course, the way to solve this is a huge kludge. Create extra rows and columns without borders and use them as margins.

Oh well, it a shame that the Office development groups don’t use a or a larger shared code library of “features.”

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