Excel 2019 - hw does one left-justify the text in an Excel horizontal bar chart axis label?

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gmj-4555 asked Aug 4, '20 alms edited Jan 6, '21

Excel 2019 - hw does one left-justify the text in an Excel horizontal bar chart axis label?

Environment
• Windows 10 Enterprise (1909) 64-bit
• Excel 2019 (part of Office Professional Plus 2019)

How graphic was created
• Highlight desired data in Excel spreadsheet
• From Excel ribbon
- Insert chart
- Bar
- 100% Stacked Bar

One would think that by highlighting the label area text box and clicking on the alignment options, one could left-justify the text … nothing seems to work. A web search yields questions about this issue but no solutions.

How does one left-justify the text (as shown in the second image below)?

Image 1. How Excel generates the graphic …

Image 2. How I’d like the graphic to appear – i.e., text in the row labels is left-justified (or right-justified) …

office-excel-itpro

image-1.png (44.2 KiB)

image-2.png (26.5 KiB)

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Answer 1 · 2020-08-05T07:47:17.807Z

emizhang-msft answered Aug 5, '20 emizhang-msft edited Aug 28, '20

I tested this problem and I found you cannot align the content to left, this is by default behavior in Excel.

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gmj-4555 · Aug 06, 2020 at 02:23 AM

@emizhang-msft - Thanks for your response!

When I was researching an answer to this formatting question (prior to submitting my question), I found folks asking the same question all the way back to Excel 97 ... and there were a lot of such questions posted!

I would like to suggest that Microsoft Office product development consider adding the ability to format (at least left- and/or right-justifying) the label area text box to the feature list. Clearly, lots of folks have been struggling to try to do this.

For a work-around in my own case (and how I created the Image 2 included in my question), I created an image overlay to address the problem. I.e., I copied the Excel graphics into a Word document (as objects) and then created an image with the left-justified text and overlaid it in Word.

The Excel default was just too difficult for committee members to deal with ... and so I got pushback on the default formatting.

Thanks!

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emizhang-msft gmj-4555 · Aug 07, 2020 at 08:09 AM

You can give the feedback to Microsoft uservoice forum, this is a way for Microsoft collect information and feedback of products from users.

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gmj-4555 emizhang-msft · Aug 07, 2020 at 08:35 PM

Thank you for the tip about user voice.

I have uploaded my suggestion, https://excel.uservoice.com/forums/304921-excel-for-windows-desktop-application/suggestions/41100292-add-horizontal-alignment-to-the-excel-2019-format

Hope it gets lots of votes and that Microsoft chooses to implement it! :-)

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Answer 2 · 2021-01-06T12:05:53.98Z

alms answered Jan 6, '21 alms edited Jan 6, '21

Workaround: This is possible in Powerpoint Charts, although a bit hidden: Mark the text element, got to "Paragraph" section in the ribbon "Home" and click on the small arrow in the bottom right corner. In the dialogue, set your alignment in the dropdown of the section "General".

Another possibility, if you need to stay in Excel: You could use data labels and assign each data label the address of the cell with the label text. Data labels can be justified, as suggested by teylyn here https://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/office/forum/office_2013_release-excel/cannot-format-axis-labels/137abcec-6009-4ce4-869b-357753447e0a.

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