QUESTION
Too much text and not enough space
Nicole wonders how to control data in a single cell. Specifically, how can you get all the text to show without getting clipped off or making the font really small AND without making the column wider?
In this image we see that the full text “What city do you live in?” is shown in the formula bar but it’s partially hidden in the cell.
Before I could respond, Nicole found out how to Wrap Text in Excel. In the screencast below, I show Wrap Text and a handy method for controlling where data breaks into the next line: ALT+Enter
The result is officially called a Carriage Break.
ANSWER
NOTE Adding a lot of information is one cell is generally a bad practice. This makes sorting and filtering difficult or impossible. It can cause the overall spreadsheet to be misaligned and cluttered. However, there is always a legit reason to go against good practices. Here’s one Example:
This is a simple sign-up sheet. It’s not going to have thousands of people in it, I won’t be running Pivot Tables from it, and won’t need to filter it. Therefore, it’s perfectly fine to violate best practices by merging cells and putting multiple rows of data in one cell.
Nicole, thanks for the question!
