Trying to make all of the text or words fit appropriately in
your Excel spreadsheet? Find out how to make text fit
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Microsoft Excel’s AutoFit function is great when you require to resize a cell to show more text than the cell currently enables. But when you can’t change the size of a cell to fit the text, this tip demonstrates how you can resize the text to fit within the cell.
SEE: Check out these Excel pointers every user must master.
When text is too long to show in a cell, that text is visible till you go into content in the nearby cell. If this happens, Excel offers a number of options that permit you to see the contents in both cells. Let’s take a look at these choices and how each modifications the view.
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Method 1: Usage AutoFit
You can use Microsoft Excel’s AutoFit feature to increase the size of a cell enough to display the complete contents of a cell. However first, let’s examine the issue. As you can see in Figure A, the content in column C obscures the material in column B.
Figure A
You can’t see all the text in column B. To apply AutoFit, hover over the right border of the column B header cell and double-click, or click the Format dropdown (in the Cells
group on the Home tab 
)and choose AutoFit Column Width(Figure
B). Figure B< img src ="https://www.techrepublic.com/wp-content/uploads/2005/08/B-Adjust-text-to-fit-within-an-Excel-cell-update-770x367.jpg"alt= "The AutoFit alternative highlighted in the Excel Format dropdown "width =" 770"height="367"
/ > 
Apply AutoFit to a column. Either way, Excel expands the width to accommodate the longest entry in the column, as shown in Figure C. Figure C< img src =" https://www.techrepublic.com/wp-content/uploads/2005/08/C-Adjust-text-to-fit-within-an-Excel-cell-update-770x245.jpg "alt ="Column B in Excel expanded to accommodate the width of the text in its cell." width= "770"height=" 245 "/ > Excel expands the width of the column. For better or even worse, this alternative leads to excessive white area in some cells in column B. To bypass the user interface, or if the double-click technique does not work, you can select the cell or column you want to resize and press Alt, H, O and I. Nevertheless, you can likewise use this
approach to decrease the size of a column that is much too wide. Method 2: Resize the content Rather than fitting the cell to the content, Excel likewise lets you resize the content
to fit the cell. Follow these actions to resize your content: 1. Select the cell with text that’s too long to completely display, and press [Ctrl] 1. Alternatively, you can click the Number group’s dialog launcher.
2. In the Format Cells dialog box, click the Alignment tab.
3. Inspect the Shrink to fit option on the Positioning tab (Figure D).
Figure D
Examine the Shrink to fit choice in the Text control area. 4. Click OK. Sometimes the Shrink to fit method shrinks text to the point of compromising legibility, as shown in Figure E. It deserves noting this choice just uses to the picked cell(s), whereas the AutoFit option uses to the whole column.
Figure E
Shrink the text to fit the cell.
To bypass the ribbon user interface to use Shrink to fit, press Alt, H, F and A. Doing so will open the Format Cells dialog displayed in Figure D. Technique 3: Wrap text An alternate approach to AutoFit and Shrink to fit is to wrap text within the selected cell by picking the Wrap Text choice
on the Positioning tab of the Format Cells dialog box (Figure F). Figure F Use the Wrap Text alternative. Remember that this approach will increase the height of the cell, as shown in Figure F. In this case, covering makes a little bit of a mess, however it comes in helpful in the right scenarios. The option you use to display text will depend upon your requirements at the time.
Luckily, Excel is versatile enough to deal with long text in several ways.To bypass the ribbon user interface to apply Shrink to fit, press Alt, H, F and A. Doing so will open the Format Cells dialog shown in Figure D. Source
