Two Lines, No Waiting
When you enter a long bit of text into a cell, it will spill over into the next cell (provided the next cell is empty). Sometimes, this can be exactly what you want. If, however, the text you are entering is a column heading, the spill over can make it confusing.
In the Format Cells dialog (Format>Cells), there is an option to Wrap Text. You’ll find it on the Alignment tab.
With Wrap Text checked, Excel will find a natural place to break the text and increase the row height to boot. An example of what this might look like is below.
As you can see, just because Excel finds a natural split doesn’t make it right. In the above example, it would look nicer if “(in thousands)” was all on one line. You can force a line break by using ALT+ENTER (hold down the Alt key while pressing Enter) when your cursor is in the position where you want the break. By placing the cursor just before the opening paren and pressing ALT+ENTER, the following result can be achieved
Wendy!:
I have tried to teach this tip of the day to my co-workers many times to no avail. One of my pet peeves is having to clean up after people who make column headings in row 1, 2 and 3 etc instead of wrapping text. I have to do this 4 time a week at least. I always wonder if it is easier to concatenate the rows or re-type. Often it’s a toss up.
Thanks for listening.
14 April 2004, 3:24 pmDick:
Wendy: You know, JWalk should add that to his PUP utilities. It would be easy to write and pretty darn useful.
15 April 2004, 10:39 amJenny:
My question is, if your text line is *really* long and spills over the page margin, how do you make it fit on the page (in two or three lines of text) without wrapping all the text into one very tall cell (i.e. a narrow column)? I haven’t been able to find out how to do this and it’s driving me crazy. Any ideas? Thanks, and since I am a beginner, I need very specific info.
24 July 2005, 8:35 pm