Page 130 - Excel Timesaving Techniques for Dummies

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Getting Your Text under Control
several lines, select the Wrap Text check box in the of course, truncates the long column headings in
Text Control section of the Alignment tab. You can the second row.
use this control to break up a long table heading that 3. Select the range of cells with the long column
would normally spill over several blank columns so
headings that you want wrapped to the new
that all its text fits within the current column width
narrower column widths.
set for the data in rows below. You can also use it to
effectively control long column headings that would For this example, I selected the cell range B2:J2.
otherwise force you to widen the columns of data 4. Open the Format Cells dialog box (Ctrl+1),
much more than is necessary to just display their select the Alignment tab, select the Wrap Text
numerical entries. check box, and click OK.
Figures 21-7 and 21-8 illustrate this kind of situation
Figure 21-8 shows the results of this operation. Excel
and solution. Figure 21-7 shows a sales table whose
automatically wraps the column headings so that
column headings are extra long. They’re so long in
they’re entirely displayed within the current column
fact that it would require widening their columns
widths. At the same time, the program automatically
way beyond what is necessary just to display the
increases the height of row 2 to accommodate these
financial data.
wrapped lines of text.

• Figure 21-7: Sales table with really long column headings
whose text needs to be wrapped. • Figure 21-8: Sales table after wrapping the column
headings to display on several lines in the
To remedy this situation and make this table much narrower columns.
more compact, follow these steps:
Shrinking the text to fit within a cell
1. Select the columns that contain the long col- The second way of getting long text entries to fit
umn headings.
within a certain cell width is to shrink their text
In this example, I selected the letters B through J down to size with the Shrink to Fit check box option.
in the column header. This option is a lot less successful than Wrap Text
because Excel often ends up shrinking your text
2. Manually narrow the selected columns to the
width necessary for displaying the data entries. entries so much that they’re illegible without the use
of a magnifying glass. (See Figure 21-9 for a prime
For this example, with the help of the Width example of this.)
ScreenTip, I narrowed the selected columns to a
width of 12.86 characters (95 pixels) by dragging Reserve the Shrink to Fit option to those text
the right border of one of the selected columns. entries that almost fit within the current col-
(Here, narrowing one column automatically nar- umn width to guard against reducing them so
rows all the other selected columns.) Doing this, much that they’re no longer legible.