Simple clear advice in plain English

Make your text fit properly in Excel cells

Organise cells containing lots of text in Excel

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If you have a cell in Excel with lots of text it can often be obscured by the cell to the right, or look messy.

My solution is to display the text on multiple lines and make the cell higher. Select the cell or cells, left-click on the Format menu and then on Cells.

When the Format Cells window appears, click on the Alignment tab. Click in the box labelled Wrap text so a tick appears and then click on OK.

One alternative is to select the option Shrink to fit that changes the font size so the text fits. Be careful though because this can make the text so small that it cannot be read.

Alternatively try changing the font to one that is narrower than the default Arial. There is a variant of Arial designed for this very task called Arial Narrow.

To increase the height of the cell, move the mouse to the bottom of the row number so it changes from an arrow and double-click.
Mike Hallam

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