When your Excel spreadsheet has cells with a lot of content, the Microsoft application often displays just a fraction of it and automatically hides the rest. This happens when the length of the text or characters in a cell exceeds the set width of the cell and the neighboring cell is not empty.
You can still view all the contents by double-clicking the cell or selecting the cell and looking in the formula bar, but these methods aren’t very practical. A much more elegant solution is to wrap the text in an Excel cell so that the contents are displayed on multiple lines. We’ll explain how to wrap text in your Excel spreadsheet and deal with any problems you might encounter.
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Office OnlineOneDrive with 1TB24/7 supportThe easiest way to wrap text in Excel is to use the automatic text wrap feature. You can enable this feature for any cells in your spreadsheet. When you do this, Excel automatically ensures that the formatted cells contents aredisplayed on multiple lines so that all the data is visible at all times.
It only takes a few steps to have Excel automatically wrap text in cells: Start by left-clicking the cell that you want to format so that text wraps automatically. If you want to select several cells at once, hold down the left mouse button and then move the mouse over the cells you want to select. Alternatively, hold down the [Ctrl] key and click on the individual cells you want to select:
Go to the “Home” tab (if you’re not already there) and click the “Wrap text” button in the “Alignment” section:
In our document, the result looks like this:
Sometimes it’s useful to have Excel insert a line break at a specific point in a cell, for example if you need to arrange certain content elements underneath each other. Microsoft Excel offers a manual line break function for this purpose. To use it, open Edit mode for the cell you want to edit. You can do this in two ways:
Now place the cursor where you want Excel to insert the line break in the cell and press the keyboard shortcut [Alt] + [Enter]. Hold down the Alt key.
Use this shortcut twice if you want to insert another line break and add an entire paragraph to the Excel cell (although strictly speaking, there are two line breaks):
The instructions above show how easy it is to wrap text (insert line breaks) in Excel cells. But sometimes the two text wrap functions described above don’t work properly. This often happens when you’re working with third-party Excel documents: Problems with the feature are almost always caused by existing formatting that prevents you from optimizing how lengthy cell contents are displayed. In many cases, the text wrap feature doesn’t work as expected because of the “Merge cells” function or if you’ve set a specific value for the maximum row height.
In many cases Excel may appear to properly wrap text in a cell, but it still doesn’t show the full contents of the cell. This is usually because the author of the document has set the row to a specific height, which causes Excel to hide some of the content despite the text wrap. You can solve this problem in a few steps:
You can’t wrap text in cells that have been merged in Excel. If manual or automatic wrapping doesn’t work in Excel, it may be because the selected cell is a merged cell. If you want to wrap text in this cell in Excel you must first unmerge the cells.
If you want to keep the merged cell, you can still use the word wrap by manually adjusting the row height and column width.
You can unmerge a merged cell as follows:
Excel with Microsoft 365 and IONOS!
Use Excel to create spreadsheets and organize your data - included in all Microsoft 365 package!
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Drop-down lists allow you to configure tables in Excel in a way that is more professional, easier and less prone to errors. However, like anything else in day-to-day work, drop-down menus also have to be changed now and again. For this reason, we are going to explain how to edit Excel drop-down lists so you can adapt their content and appearance and add useful information for other users.
There are several reasons why you may want to find duplicates in Excel – to filter out errors or analyze double entries. Excel can automatically display these duplicates to you. Thanks to color highlighting, you can instantly see which entries appear more than once in your tables. And the feature is easy to use: We’ll explain how it works.
If a table field contains several values, it often makes sense to split the respective Excel cell. Although the Microsoft spreadsheet program doesn’t offer a general function for this, you can split the cell content among multiple columns by configuring and using separators. We explain how you can use this option in your Excel document.
The Microsoft Excel program is a convenient and easy way to collect and archive data. In addition, mathematical formulas can be solved using the software. For example, you can use the Excel SUM function to add the values of specific cells or entire ranges of cells without having to use a calculator.
Microsoft Word is the most popular software for creating text documents and simplifies day to day work. One of the features that’s most helpful is automatic text formatting, for example the automatic insertion of a line break in Word, when a word goes beyond the line length. Often, however, it can also make sense to insert a manual line break, to better structure the document.
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