Insert a Tab in Excel Cell

As already mentioned, Excel is a great tool for automatization, numbers, and reporting. It can sometimes be stressful to present the data the way we want. One of the things that can get in our way is to indent our data by inserting a tab in our cell.

To show how to do this, and how to show the data in a better way by inserting a tab in our cell, we will use the example below.

Insert a Tab in Excel Cell

Although it might seem pretty easy to do it, this task- inserting a tab, is not so simple. You cannot simply go into a cell and click Tab. By doing this, you would just position yourself into another cell.

In a Word file, all you need to do to indent your text is click on the Tab button on your keyboard.

In Excel, you also have an option for indenting. Suppose that we have the following text in Excel:

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Now we want our text to be indented to the right. To do so, we need to click on the cell A2, go to the Home tab, find the Alignment section, and click on the Increase Indent icon, as shown in the picture below:

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This is the result we get when we click on it:

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When we click it more times- three of four, we get the following results:

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Using the indenting option limits us to the exact number of spaces that are being added from the beginning of our cell to our text. We can also define the spaces in the tab manually.

We will simply write “Different text” in cell A4:

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Now, to move this text to the right, we need to click on the cell, go to Home >> Alignment, and then on the Alignment Settings in the bottom right corner:

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Once we click on it we will notice that we are on the Alignment tab:

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We will choose Left (Indent) on a dropdown beneath Horizontal: and choose the indent we want (in our case we will input number 4). This is the result we got:

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It is important to note that we cannot use decimals when defining indenting, i.e. we cannot use 3.5 or 4.5, for example.

Again, there is no simple way to insert a tab in a certain cell in Excel. To produce a tab in Excel, we can use the function CHAR(9). However, it does nothing for us.

Besides indenting, we can also use space and concatenating options. For example, in a formula like this:

When we insert this in cell A6, our text looks like this:

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Tomasz Decker is an Excel specialist, skilled in data analysis and financial modeling.