July 18, 2017 - by Bill Jelen
Superscript and subscripts in Excel! Finally, in 2017, Microsoft gave us faster ways to create superscripts and subscripts in Excel.
There are two ways to apply subscript or superscript. The first option is to double click a cell, or select the cell and press F2 to enter edit mode. Then, select the text you'd like to format, and access the format cells dialog box. On the Font tab, check the format you want, and press OK to confirm. Excel allows the part of string to be superscripted using concatenate if the additional string is copied from another source, like a website. It is quite a devious way, but you can use an online superscript generator like lingojam.com/SuperscriptGenerator and copy the result into Excel.
Watch Video
- Superscript and Subscripts were hard to do in Excel
- June 2017, in response to customer votes on Excel.UserVoice.com
- there are now two items you can add to your Quick Access Toolbar
Video Transcript
Learn Excel From MrExcel, Podcast Episode 2112: Superscript And Subscript.
Hey. Welcome back to the MrExcel netcast. I'm Bill Jelen. Wow. This is a cool one. excel.uservoice.com. There was [unintelligible – 00:13] add icons for the font superscript and subscript so we can put them on the quick access toolbar. 372 votes before this happened. It was a hassle, right, because if you wanted to superscript or subscript something, you had to select those cells or select those characters, go into FONT, and then choose SUBSCRIPT, like that, so a couple of extra clicks, and starting in June, if you have Office 365, they've given us two new quick access toolbar icons.
Now, if you happened to see yesterday's episode, yesterday's episode 2111, there is currently a bug with the quick access toolbar. I have an update for that. CUSTOMIZE QUICK ACCESS TOOLBAR. You have to go to COMMANDS NOT IN THE RIBBON and scroll down to the Ss, but you see that this is broken. This is broken. They know about it and it should be fixed within a couple of days or two, but here is the beautiful workaround.
Even though it's not populating here, the icons are still there. So, what we have to do is come out to this thing called TELL ME. TELL ME. I'm sure there was an episode here where I just complained about how miserable TELL ME was, but it turns out that if you type SUPERSCRIPT -- there it is -- you can right click and ADD TO QUICK ACCESS TOOLBAR. Bam, and then SUBSCRIPT, right click, and ADD TO QUICK ACCESS TOOLBAR.
After, let's say, July 21st, you won't have to do that because it'll be back in the quick access toolbar dialog. You can just go into Excel options and everything is great, but, alright, so, let's see how much easier it is to do this.
Let's say that we wanted to do the H2O. So, I have H2O like that. I'm going to press F2 to leave me in edit mode, left arrow, SHIFT+LEFT ARROW to select the 2, select the SUBSCRIPT. Bam. That's cool. Alright. Let's try 3 raised to the 2. So, 3, 2, press the F2 key, hold down SHIFT, LEFT ARROW key to select the 2, and press SUPERSCRIPT, and it didn't work. Why didn't it work? Because I was not entering text, I entered a number and, apparently, you can't format just one of the characters in a number. You have to have it be text. So, let's try again. We're going to do ‘ to say, hey, this is a text cell. 3, 2, F2, left, hold down the SHIFT key, press the LEFT ARROW key, and then hit the SUPERSCRIPT, like that, bam, cool. Alright.
I never used subscripts and superscripts ever, so this does not matter to me one bit, but my friends who are engineers who have to create superscripts and subscripts all the time love this feature, and that's awesome. I'm glad that 372 people voted and I'm glad that Microsoft put it in for them.
If you have a feature that you desperately want in Excel, go out to excel.uservoice.com, choose Excel for Windows, write it up and then get your co-workers to start to vote. The statistic that I heard, this great statistic, out of all the 1000s of votes, so far in the first half of 2017, they've covered 20% of those votes. Based on a vote basis, right? So, by doing this one thing, they said, alright, we made 372 people happy. So, the whole key to excel.uservoice.com is getting a lot of votes.
Alright. So, there you are. Power Excel With MrExcel, newly updated for all kinds of great tips and tricks in Excel. Click that i on the top right-hand corner to check it out.
So, today's episode: superscript and subscripts; hard to do in Excel; in June 2017, in response to customer votes on excel.uservoice.com, two new items you can add to the quick access toolbar; and, again, an update to yesterday's 2111, which I'm going to make unlisted now, that we know what the problem is; the quick access toolbar customization should be fixed here within a week; but, in the meantime, you can get something in using the TELL ME box if you needed to add it to the quick access toolbar.
Alright. Well, hey. I want to thank you for stopping by. We'll see you next time for another netcast from MrExcel.
Download File
Download the sample file here: Podcast2112.xlsm
Title Photo: lonke / Pixabay
Sometimes you may need to superscript text in Excel, such as to display an exponent. But the superscript option is good at hiding. Here's how to superscript in Excel.
As with many complex programs, there's more than one way to superscript in Excel. That doesn't help you much when you can't find it, of course. This tricks works in Excel for Office 365, Excel 2016, Excel 2013, Excel 2010, and Excel 2007. In other words, every version of Excel with the ribbon.
How to superscript in Excel
I'm not a fan of the ribbon and never have been because it hides stuff like superscript. But after more than 10 years, it's probably not going anywhere.
The trick to tolerating the ribbon is remembering where the ribbon hides stuff. There's a little diagonal arrow in the lower right corner of most sections of the ribbon. The font section has one, and that's where the options besides the usual bold, italic and underline hide. There's a little arrow next to the underline icon, but that's not where you find it. You have to click the diagonal arrow in the lower right.
The arrow is easy to ignore, but it's there. If you've never noticed it before it's OK. When you highlight a cell and then click that obscure little arrow, something else pops up.
At this point it's probably fairly obvious what to do next. Under the section labeled Effects, one of the options is Superscript. Click Superscript, then click OK.
That works great if you want to superscript a full cell in Excel. But what if you want to only superscript some of the text in a cell? More on that in a second.
How to superscript in Excel with a context menu
You can also click in the cell, then right-click and select Format Cells from the context menu. From there, click on the Font tab, then the option you see above shows up.
Which is the right way? Whichever one you can remember or find more quickly.
How to superscript part of a cell in Excel
How To Type Superscript In Excel 10
To superscript just part of a cell, click in the cell. Next, inside the text box, highlight the text you want to superscript, either using the mouse or using the combination of the shift key and the arrow keys. Your text will look something like this:
Next, either right click and select Format Cells or click the arrow in the Fonts section of the ribbon just like you did before. Select Superscript and click OK. Now you'll see just the part of the text you highlighted in superscript, like you see in Cell B1 in the example above.
This functionality is important, as it allows you to show exponents. Given that math is a big part of the reason people use Excel, it's perhaps a little bit surprising that superscripts and subscripts got hidden so deeply when Microsoft built Excel's user interface. But we can't control what Microsoft does. At least now you know where to find it.
How to remember how to superscript in Excel
Insert Superscript Excel
There's no really easy trick to remembering specifically how to superscript text. The key is remembering to look for that little arrow in the corner. I had been using Office 2007 for a good two years before I ever noticed that little arrow. Now that I know what it does, when I can't find something, I look for the arrow and usually find what I need.
Other Excel problems and solutions
There are lots of Excel problems that have relatively easy solutions, even if the solutions aren't obvious. Here are a few more.