Microsoft Excel Spreadsheet - Formatting Cells in Excel is Easy

I have make spreadsheets where I want to make a label for a cell but the horizontal space for the column, or the vertical space for the row was very limited and there was not enough room for me to put all my text in this limited space.

Sometimes I wish to have a very large cell space in the Excel spreadsheet. We know that when we use the drag (double-arrow icon) to make the cell wider or taller, it will widen the entire column of cells, or make tall the entire row of cells. For example what if we wanted to have 3 columns with a header in the top cell of each column, AND ALSO one larger header above those 3 headers. We want that large header to take up the horizontal space of the three columns. If we were to drag and widen that cell, it would widen the entire column, which is not what we want, we just wish that one cell could be widened.

It turns out, there are many ways to go about doing something like this in an Excel Spreadsheet when your writing doesn't fit exactly how you would like it in a cell. The easiest method is to "Wrap text", "Shrink to fit", or "Merge cells". Each of these three are types of text controls that can be found in the "Format Cells" dialog box under the "Alignment" tab. In order to get to this option, there are two main ways.

One is to select the cell(s) you would like to modify and right click on it then select "Format Cells...". The second is to click on it and go to Format -> Cells... . Doing this will bring up the Format Cells dialog box. In the "Alignment" tab, there are different options you have. The ones we want are under the label "Text control". There is a check-box next to each option.

The best way to learn what they mean is to use it. Test each one of those options out and see what they do. If you want a little description, then here it is.

Wrap text: If you have a cell that is tall, this will make it so that when your text reaches the right side of the cell, the next text you enter will be put on the next line in that cell. This is just like Word-wrap from Notepad.

Shrink to fit: This will make the text size to whatever it needs to be in order for it to all fit inside the cell that the text is contained in.

Merge cells: This only works if you have more than one cell highlighted when you go to format the Cells. This would solve the problem of having a header that is the width of three default-sized cells. Just highlight three of those cells, and check "Merge Cells", and you now have 1 cell that is the width of 3 cells without having to make the entire column the width of 3 cells!

These three options can be very helpful if you have a Excel spreadsheet that has a lot of data and text that needs to be formatted neatly.