Hi, this is Wayne again with a topic “3 Ways to Fit Excel Data within a Cell”.
In this Excel video, I’m going to show you three different ways to try to fit a large amount of text in a cell in Excel. Let’S get started so here I have a spreadsheet with information about the presidents of the United States, their birthplaces and birthdays, and also a short biography about each president and the biographical information was generated by chat GPT. I simply took the bi graphies that were generated by chat, GPT and put them in here in the spreadsheet, so they don’t represent my political opinion or anything else. It’S just information that was generated for the spreadsheet.
So, as you can see, the information in columns B and C doesn’t all fit visibly in the cell, so you can see here in cell B2. If I doubleclick, you can see the full amount of text born in West Morland County Virginia in 1732. That’S what’s actually in cell B2, but you can’t see all of that information.
Now there are ways to solve that problem. For example, I could doubleclick between columns B and C to make that column wider. Now it’s going to be wide enough to show everything in that column.
But what, if you don’t want to do that? What if you want to keep the column widths as they are? What could you do and we have a similar problem here in column C and in fact, in this case, the text – that’s in column C, is far far longer than the amount of space in column C, and so it appears to be spilling over into the other Columns now it’s not really doing that. I could certainly type in these cells in column D, and you can see that the text in column C is contained within that column. It’S just that much of it is obscured, is kind of hidden behind the scenes and you have to double click, to really see it.
Okay. So what are some ways that I could address this? Let’S start with column B. In some cases it would be nice if I could just tap, enter on the keyboard and create a line break.
Just like you do in Microsoft Word. It would be nice to tap enter and have Virginia in 1732 be put below born in West Morland County. But if you tap enter Excel, simply selects the next cell below it.
So the trick for putting a line break into Microsoft Excel is making sure that you’re inside the cell, with the flashing cursor and having that cursor, be where you want the line break to happen and then simply hold the ALT key and tap enter on the keyboard. And that forces a line break now I can tap enter on the keyboard, and so now we can see all the text that’s in cell B2, even though I did not stretch out the column width, we could do the same thing with John Adams. Maybe I’ll go right here, Alt Enter, and you could just continue to do that with all the data that doesn’t Naturally Fit in inside the width of column B, so that technique could be perfect, especially if you just have a couple of cells that have just a Little bit too much text to fit, you could just use the line break option by holding alt and tapping enter notice, what it does to the cell. It makes it taller. So that is something to consider now, let’s look at a second option that we have and we’re going to use this second option in column C now, in order to make it clear, what’s happening, I’m going to enter some data into column D, maybe I’ll put in A column heading I’ll call this presidential order, so first president, second president, Etc and I’ll just put in a number one tap enter. And then John Adams was the second president and then I’ll.
Just double click on the autofill handle the little green Square in the lower right corner, and that will extend the pattern down the spreadsheet okay. So now I think it’s very clear. What’S happening in column C, this data just doesn’t fit, and so it’s hiding much of the data instead of using line breaks this time, I’m going to use wrap text and just so that this looks a little better.
I’M going to stretch out column C to about the same width as column B, and now I’m going to select the entire column C. Now it’s not required that you select the whole column. You could just select a particular cell but select whatever you want to have wrap text for wrap text. You go to the Home, tab, look on the home ribbon and look around in the alignment group for the wrap text option. Now, if you don’t see the words wrap text, look for this symbol and then just go ahead and click it, and this changes the look of the spreadsheet dramatically, but notice that I did not have to manually put in line breaks Excel automatically figured out how to Fit this large amount of text within the width of the column and in order to do that, it had to increase the height of the column.
But that’s okay and you can see that this worked all the way down the spreadsheet, because I selected the entire column C. Now I’m going to undo that there’s a couple of ways I could undo it. I could select column C again and then just go up here to the alignment group and turn off wrap text, and that takes it back to the way it was or, of course, you could hold controll and tap Z to undo what you just did. Okay, let’s now look at the third option we have for trying to fit all of this text within the boundaries I’ve set up for the column width. The third option is called shrink to fit and it’s not going to be a great option in this case, but let’s try it anyway. If I go here to the Home tab home, ribbon alignment group, I’m going to click this little button, I call it the launch button. Some people call it the dialogue box launcher, but I’m just going to click on that and we get this box that pops open. That has lots of different options.
There’S WAP text again, if I want to use that, but here’s the option that I want to show next shrink to fit by. Turning that on and clicking okay look: what happens? The width and height of the cells don’t change. Instead, the text is just made to be smaller so that it fits within the boundaries like, I said, not a good option in this case. Why? Because there’s just way too much text now, if I stretch out column C and make it bigger notice that the text got a little bit bigger and if I stretch it out again, it gets even bigger. I’M going to undo all of that and I want to say that shrink to fit would work much better in column B than it did in column C. So, let’s try that I select column B. Go into the alignment launch button turn on shrink to fit now in order to do that, I’m going to have to take off wrap text. That’S okay shrink to fit click.
Okay, and this worked much much better. Some of the text has to be smaller in order to fit other text text can stay big cuz. It fits naturally now, like I said at the beginning of this video, I generated these short biographies by using chat GPT. It’S artificial intelligence.
If you’re interested in learning more about chat, GPT and artificial intelligence watch some of my other videos on that topic, but in the meantime I hope you found this tutorial to be helpful. If you did please like follow And subscribe and when you do click the bell and you’ll be notified when I post another video, if you’d like to support my channel, you can do that by clicking the thanks button below the video, and you could support me through My patreon account and by buying Channel merch and you’ll, see information about those options in the description below the video speaking of patreon. I want to say thank you to my $ 5 patreon supporters.
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