When you use Excel, the primary purpose is for numbers but what most people don’t realize is the impact of font type in Excel numbers copied to Word or PowerPoint. Depending how you copy and paste it your numbers may not line up any more. So how will you be able to line up numbers in Excel (and Word/ PowerPoint or any other program).
YouTube Make numbers line up in Excel/ Word/ PowerPoint
Add/ Delete spaces to make numbers line up- does not work
Most people will indirectly know of this issue where they have to add and delete spaces to try and make the numbers line up, but it is impossible to get it exactly right.
A simple way to see this is to combine words and numbers in a single cell in Excel making the number of characters exactly the same.
As shown below, if you use the Arial font, the numbers don’t seem to line up.
However, if all you change is the font type to Courier New you see the following. Notice that it is much easier to read the numbers as they line up underneath each other.
The reason for this is that some fonts (e.g. Arial) use a different amount of space depending on the letter or number size i.e. a 1 is smaller than a 0.
Other fonts, called monospaced or fixed width fonts (e.g. Courier New and Consolas)
use the same size for each character irrelevant of the size of the character.
So if for any reason you find yourself adding or deleting spaces but not getting characters to align properly, try change the font to Courier or Consolas!
Related
Link Excel to PowerPoint (or Word)
Link charts from Excel to Word
Why you may struggle to align numbers in Excel (even if you add or delete spaces)