Larilyn's Tip of the Week:   Microsoft Excel - Just Trying to Fit In

Today, I'm going to be talking about a few quick things you can do in Microsoft Excel to make life SO much easier.

There are many reasons why your text or numbers might not fit in the cell you are trying to fit things in.  Maybe you have a number with too many digits after the decimal point.  Maybe it's an open ended questions column that you have a lengthy answer to.  Maybe, for some reason, someone just formatted the cell to be too small to even put a standard date in.

Regardless of the reason, if you're like me - you like your spreadsheet to look well organized and properly sized so the format looks nice.

So today, I'm sharing a few little tricks to help with that.

The first thing is manually adding a line break in a cell.  If you know that your answer is lengthy but you don't want to mess with the width of the column, you can type until the column is full and then hit Alt+Enter to jump down to a new line in the same cell (hitting just enter will take you down to the next cell, so make sure you hit Alt!)

Now, if you are going to have several cells with answers that are lengthy, or even an entire column that may be like that - I'd recommend formatting the cell/cells with the Wrap Text option.  This will basically automatically make the text jump down to a new line when there is no more room left in the column.  You can find the Wrap text option on the Home tab of the menu bar, in the Alignment section.

And if you resize the column after selecting this option, the wrap text feature will automatically adjust the text to wrap to fit properly in the new sized column.

Which is great if you're really paying attention as you go along, making your changes or formatting with Wrap Text.  However, what if you have a document where you paid no attention, and you realize that none of your rows or columns are the right height or width that you want them to be at?  

You could go through and re-size each one individually.  And if there's only one or two, not such a big deal.  However, what if you have dozens and dozens?

Easy peasy!  You can actually tell Excel to Autofit all rows or columns in one fell swoop!  All you need to do is hit CTRL+A - this selects your entire worksheet.  Then you will go up to the Format drop down (found in the Cells section of your Home tab of the menu bar).

Once you click the drop down menu, you will see the option to either AutoFit Row Height, or AutoFit Column Width.

Select which one you'd like.  Then all of the rows or columns in your Sheet will automatically adjust to be the right size for whatever you have typed in.

So there you have it!  No matter what you are doing in Excel, you can easily make things fit so they look nice and neat, and like they belong in the columns you are putting them into!