Using the JUSTIFY Command: Reflow Text in Microsoft Excel

Suppose you have this data:

And you’d like to make it look like this:

Many people are unaware that Excel has this ability already built-in! It’s the Justify command, found on the right side of the Home tab:

What this feature does is reflow text. To use it, you have to make a specific selection first. In the above example, the selection had to be A1:C3 or longer (A1:C4, A1:C100, etc.):

From this selection, issuing the Justify command would reflow the text as we saw.

You could have selected just columns A and B and reissued the same command for this result:

(The resulting selection, A1:A4, happens after the command is completed. The entire columns A:B were selected prior to using Justify.

It aligns with the column widths. Notice the difference with different column widths here (column B is wider, column C is pretty narrow), where A:C was selected:

OK, here’s another trick: if you select A1:D3 and issue the justify command, you would get this:

That is, it reflows text from 3 lines into 2 lines! If you had selected A1:G3, you’d see this:

Pretty cool. 

Let’s look at a new example. Say you have the data in column A, below, and you want to make it look like cell C1:

If you select A1:J7, for example (remember, there’s nothing yet in C1) and issue the command, you’d see this:

So here’s a trick to overcome that. In cell C1 we’ll enter a formula to both change A1 to text and insert a comma. That formula is =A1&", ", and we fill down to C7:

We have the makings of a solution, but we don’t want that ending comma in cell C7, so we change that formula to =A7&"" which appends an empty string but it’s now text:

We’re not yet ready to use the Justify command because, if you read the message above, it also can’t contain formulas! So we have to copy C1:C7, then paste just the values back into the same place. Ctrl/C can copy, and we can use the Paste Special command to paste just the values:

So this:

Becomes this when you use the justify command:

And we’re complete!