Office & productivity software forum: Expanding the height of Excel cells

Adjusting the cell to wrap text doesn't cause the cell to automatically readjust its width as the rows increase. It only causes the cell to wrap the text within that one cell, rather than spill over into the next cell. There HAS to be a way to make the cell's width automatically readjust as the text wraps within a cell. I've seen it work on other computers before. There's just something wrong with the settings on this one.

What the writer is looking for is the cell to auto adjust when typing. Initially, when setting up the sheet, if the writer selects FORMAT, WRAP TEXT, the cell will auto adjust. HOWEVER,

if the writer decides that the page/sheet lines are in the 500's, like I did, I went to the top of the sheet, and pulled the column adjustment handle.

The cells will not adjust to that movement. Instead the page cells remain the same size - the content will stretch but the cells will have white space. The writer must physically adjust the length of each line. Every time Microsoft creates a new platform, they mess up what once worked like LOTUS.

One Lotus setting will auto adjust the cells so that there is no white space. Lotus FORMAT will auto adjust the cells no matter how many changes we make to a cell just by making changes to OPTIONS. MS EXCEL leaves its users out in the cold. SAY I WANT TO ADD DATA TO A CELL. Lotus will accommodate that additon without me having to PULL THE CELL HANDLE in any direction to adjust the cell. True, the lines across the page will also have the same height.

True, we can use "shrink to fit" which is located directly under "wrap text" in FORMAT. which reduces the size of the font to illegible.

... the auto-fit to contents feature is available for Excel 2003 and Excel 2007. As usual for things of this nature, go to format cells (or height or column or width of column) and find the auto fit feature, then choose it. The whole column or row expands. You will probably need VBA codes for an individual cell, or manually merge the cells, both methods of which would expand the cell into the next row or column, a situation which may not be wanted.) Do put the correct key words unto Google to find more...

Hello

I would like to jump into this thread about the auto adjust thing. I do understand the format>auto adjust height, but is there a way and if so how, to make the cell adjust automatically as text is entered and wrapped? General scope of why:
To start, I am not overly familiar with Excel as I have never used it too much, but I have this "should be" simple project where the users are even less familiar then I am with Excel. I have created a single "master" workbook where the user will enter data. Then I have a few other workbooks which update using the data enter in the "master". I want to protect these other workbooks so they are a "read-only". Obstacle is, one of the protected workbooks needs to be able to automatically adjust row height (both increase and decrease) to fit the number of line of text it receives from the "master". This specific workbook (the one I need to automatically adjust) is more of a presentation page then a spreadsheet format. So with that, I have tried to figure out how to bring the cell data into MSWord as an alternative, but I havent figured out how to do this either. This presentation page could be either in Excel or Word (doesnt matter) I just need to find a method to meet my objective. In either case it must adjust automatically with NO user interaction (except that of entering data in the master.xls. I am using Office 2007 to create these files, but once done they need to function with an earlier version of Excel/Word. I think the version is 2003 where these files will be going to (but not 100% sure at the moment)

Any assistance in making this happen will be greatly appreciated.
Nelson

Yes, I just got a spread sheet and I needed to enlarge the font so I could read it. The text then did not fit within many of the cells, but auto-fit feature did not fix it. In fact, some of the cells seemed locked when I went to manually make them longer to fit my text. Someone in my office more familar with Excel was baffeled by this also.

I have not figured out a way of making the text large enought to read and expand the cells to fit text -- seems like a malfunction of Excel 2007 that needs fixing.

You've probably already figured it out since you posted months ago, but I just ran into the same problem and figured out why it auto-adjusts sometimes and doesn't auto adjust others.

If your cell is set to wrap, it auto-adjusts the height of the cell if the cell is NOT merged. Once you merge the cell, it won't auto-adjust. Hope that helps if you hadn't figured it out yet

I know there's a way to do this. I probably need the automatic height adjustment deal twice a year. Each time I need it, I stupidly try to find the feature (it's anything but obvious), and end up on the internet struggling to remember how.

The elephant in the room is this: not only has Microsoft made a relatively common function virtually invisible; they apparently don't care.

Bliss! I have found how to do this! (OK, my sad life, but that's another story):

In Excel 2007, Home tab, look for the Cells group (towards the right on my screen), Format, AutoFit Row Height.

If you highlight the whole spreadsheet first (top left corner of spreadsheet), or Ctrl A, you only need to do it once.

Relief...

Thanks for that answer! I had it set to text and not the General, so now the auto adjust height works for the whole spreadsheet and the ######### are now gone.

Thanks again!