Working in Microsoft Excel (2013 and 2016) I noticed what looked like padding (space between the left side of the cell and the text) in some cells in my sheet.
(See the highlighted cell J39)
I didn’t have text indentation in the cell, and “Format Cells > Alignment > Text alignment > Indent” was set to zero.
The cause was the formatting based on the selected cell data type (in the “Number” section of the ribbon).
I had “Accounting” selected which automatically adds some padding.
Changing it to “General” returned it to normal (removed the space) for a cell with just text.
An easy mistake to make but hard to spot.