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Changing Cell Padding in Google Sheets

If you’re a Microsoft Excel user you know you can change the padding of your cells to make your spreadsheet more readable.

You may be wondering if you can change the cell padding in Google Sheet. Unfortunately, there is currently not an option for this, but there is a few workarounds that may help you get what you want.

In this tutorial, we will cover some alternatives to changing cell padding in Google Sheets

Table of Contents

Can You Change Cell Padding in Google Sheets?

No, you cannot change your cell padding in Google Sheets. There are a few workarounds though that are similar that you might want to try.

We will cover them below

How To Change Padding

Again there is no true way to adjust the padding, but here are the alternative methods that will get you something similar:

Horizontal Padding

1. Select the cells that you want to change the horizontal padding for. To select all click in the top left square on your spreadsheet or press Ctrl+A on your keyboard

Horizontal Cell Padding Alternative-1

2. In the top menu select Format

Horizontal Cell Padding Alternative-2

3. In the drop-down select Number

Horizontal Cell Padding Alternative-3

4. Select More Formats and then choose Custom Number Format

Horizontal Cell Padding Alternative-4

5. Enter as many spaces as you want for padding and then the at/address symbol (@), and then press Apply. For example if you wanted padding by two spaces you would be entering this in the text box ”  @”.

Horizontal Cell Padding Alternative-5

This is a workaround for adding horizontal padding to your spreadsheet. You can adjust the amount of padding by adding more spaces before the @ sign

Vertical Padding

1. Select the cells that you want to change the vertical padding for. To select all click in the top left square on your spreadsheet or press Ctrl+A on your keyboard

Vertical Step 1

2. In the top menu select Vertical Align and then select Middle

Vertical Step 2

3. Select Format and then select Text wrapping and make sure that it is set to Overflow or Clip, it cannot be set to Wrap for this method.

Vertical Step 3

4. Change the height of your rows by click and holding between the rows on the left-hand size while dragging to make the row bigger

Vertical Step 4

5. Your rows will now be larger while the text is still in the middle of the row which is a makeshift way of adding vertical padding

Vertical Step 5

Closing Thoughts

Again there is no true way to add padding in Google Spreadsheets but with these two methods for horizontal and vertical padding you should be able to accomplish something similar.

We hope you found this tutorial informative!

More Google Sheets Tutorials:
How to Merge and Unmerge Cells
Changing Font Format
How to Change Row Height
How to Use Paint Format