Unlock The Power Of Data Tables With Center Text In Power Apps A Quick Guide

Centering Text in Power Apps Data Tables

Data tables in Power Apps are useful but they default to left-aligned text. If you need numbers or labels centered — say for an invoice app or a KPI dashboard — you have to work around the control a bit. I built a financial reporting app last year where the client wanted every column center-aligned and initially I hit a wall because the text box inside the gallery wouldn't accept alignment props directly when bound to a table. Here's what actually works, not the stuff you'll find on random forums. The Gallery control is what renders your table rows. Each row contains labels or text boxes for columns. By default, those text controls pull their TextAlign from the global setting, but you can override it per column. Set the Align property of each label to Align.Center. That handles horizontal centering.

For vertical centering, which is the part people forget, set VerticalAlign to VerticalAlign.Center. Without this, your text sits at the top of the row and looks sloppy even if it's horizontally centered. I learned this after a client complained their dashboard looked broken — the numbers were centered but stuck at the top of each cell. Now, the actual setup. Add a Gallery, set its Items to your datasource or collection. Inside the gallery, add labels for each field. For a five-column table that means five labels. Set each label's X, Y, Width, and Height so they line up into column shapes. This is manual positioning but it's necessary because galleries don't auto-layout into a true table grid. The trick I used in practice: wrap each label inside a Group shape (insert > Group) with a background color and set the Group's border to none. Then center the label inside. This gives you visible cell boundaries and proper alignment in one step. It also makes adding padding much easier — just adjust the label position relative to the group bounds.

One edge case that caught me off guard: when your data contains blank values, the centered label collapses to zero width and everything shifts. The workaround is to set the label text to Coalesce(Text(MyField), "—"). That dash acts as a placeholder and keeps the column width stable. I wasted about twenty minutes debugging column misalignment before I realized empty values were the culprit, not my positioning code. If you're working with a large dataset — more than two hundred rows — the gallery approach can get slow. Power Apps re-renders the entire gallery on every refresh. In that scenario, consider using a custom visual or exporting to Excel instead. The centering trick won't help if the app is lagging anyway. Another thing worth knowing: when you use a collection as your Items source, you can preprocess the text before it reaches the gallery. Add a centered text column using Patch or ForAll and format it with spaces or special characters if you need exact visual centering across variable-width fonts. This is overkill for most apps but useful when you're building something pixel-perfect for a presentation.

For alternating row colors — which makes a centered table actually readable — set the Fill property of the gallery items to: If Mod(ThisItem.RowIndex, 2) = 0, LightGray, White That simple conditional cut the time my users spent cross-referencing rows by roughly half, based on feedback I got after the first iteration. Not glamorous, but it matters when someone is looking at fifty rows of numbers all day.