CELL TEXT ALIGNMENT NOT WORKING IF CONDITIONAL FORMAT APPLIED

Question

I have a 3.1 GHz Intel Core i5 Mac running OS X v10.8.2.  I am using Excell for Mac 2011 Home and Student version 14.2.5.  Here's the problem: the controls for text alignment and text wrap have no effect in a cell that has been conditionally formatted. No matter how the text was aligned and/or wrapped prior to application of conditional formatting, the text always appears at the bottom of the cell, left justified, and not wrapped. The status of the formatting controls in the tool bar may be showing otherwise, but the text always appears unwrapped, at the bottom of the cell, and left justified.  I would be most grateful for instruction on how to control text alignment and text wrap in a cell that has been conditionally formatted.

Answer 1

I suspect my problem may somehow be related to having opened a file originally created in a different spread sheet program (Apple's Numbers 9). The Apple sheet had various formulae and conditional formatting not compatible with excel so was inactivated on import. I modified the import to get it to work in excel.  I resolved all the error results so everything was good except for the problem with formatting I described in my first post. The text in cells I was having problems with were concatenated from various data via lookups and functions to parse text strings. Anyway, the problem with formatting ceased to manifest when I experimented with a similar configuration created de novo within a virgin excel spreadsheet. So, thanks for your quick attention to my post.

Answer 2

FWIW, I'm seeing the same behavior Bob G describes.

Before you go chasing symptoms, though, see if a simple restart of your Mac makes any difference.

Answer 3

Well, that certainly is not my experience. wrapped text and vertical alignment stay as they were originally set before the conditional format was applied. Also that formatting does not change whether the formatting conditions are met or not. Please explain EXACTLY what you are doing, what the formatting conditions are, and what format you have selected if the conditions are met. based on your descriptions, I can not verify your problem and it looks like conditional formatting is working properly.

Answer 4

I have the poblem EVEN when using a NEW Excel worksheet directly within Excel 2013 (on the same Windows OS).

Or when reimporting to Excel a worksheet initially created with Excel 2013 but saved/shared online (not on Office Online, but on Google Docs).

Office does not offer the user any UI option to revert this "compability tweak" applied blindly on loaded documents, and does not even notice the user about the incompatibility.

You may think that this is a bug of Google Docs, but this is not. Office applies some new invisible requirements on documents and breaks them without notice.

I consider this bug to be an unfair trick to promote only the Microsoft online cloud, and break other competing solutions.

This is also clearly a bug for the conformance with the ODF format (that Office 2013 officially supports including as a default preference for users, instead of the Ms Office XML formats). This is also a bug for compatibility with all other past versions of Office on Windows and MacOS.

When Microsoft advertizes users tht it offers a great solution for interoperability, this is wrong in this case (and in fact even if this is a "feature", this is not documented anywhere by Microsoft, for users or for Office developers, or documented in an obscure area difficult to find).

As always, Microsoft is leading the championship of incompatibility enve with its OWN solutions. It constantly changes things and creates new incompatibilities, and promotes clear bugs into features, and then refuses to change things because it "could break" applications (in fact these bugs constantly break more things each time they appear, than what keeping them will solve). Ms Office 2013 is still a very minor software in our world, and it should live in a world where there are MUCH more solutions (for various versions of Windows or Mac OS, or for users of other past versions of Office, which are still officially maintained by Microsoft, or for competing cloud solutions or data formats like ODF).

Microsoft should NEVER create an internal "compatiblity" tweak without allowing the user to disable it by some UI option. If the new "feature" changes things where it is actually a bug (like here), this bug should be corrected and disabled by an UI. Note that ALL Office documents are tracking internally the version of the software used to create it initially.

Here the only cause of the problem is that the "conditional format" dialogs forgot to include a tab or pane for the alignment settings (those settings whuch are available internally, but also within the interface for unconditional cell formats). This stupid bug is clearly something that has been forgotten in the new UI design of Excel in Office 2013.

Answer 5

I'm experiencing the same thing.  Other blogs suggest it has to do with the fact that the Excel file was originally created in an older version of Excel (not the current 2011 for Mac).  I'm running Excel for Mac 2011 v14.3.6 (130613), & OSX v10.8.4.

Here's what I'm seeing:

1. Prior to applying cond. formatting, various cells within Columns B-D have an "x", which is centered both horizontally & vertically.
2. I apply boilerplate CF to Cols. B-D:  Style: Classic; Format only cells that contain specific text containing "x"; Format with light red fill with dark red text.
3. The result is those various cells in Cols. B-D now show a red "x", light red fill, aligned left/bottom.
4. But if I move & save that worksheet into a new file, the CF works correctly; it only seems to be an issue when it stays within the original Excel file.

Any ideas or work-arounds would be greatly appreciated.