Monday, February 25, 2013

Tip #25 - Wrapping Text in Excel

100 Computer Tips in 100 Days


Tip #25 - Wrapping Text in Excel


There are some things people do in Excel that frustrate me. I know that they either missed some fundamental Excel training along the way or that they've been using Excel for a long time and haven’t noticed some of Excel’s newer features.

One thing that I see people doing is breaking words apart on separate lines, as in the first group of headings in the image to the right.  What you should do is type all of the words and then use the Wrap Text option. This will wrap the text on as many lines as are needed. If you resize the column the text will rewrap. If you want a particular word to start a new line you can use Alt + Enter to force a “line break”.  Keeping the column heading in one cell rather than breaking it up across several rows is important when you use advanced features of the program such as filtering, sorting, pivot tables and mail merge. If you were to create a pivot table you could be presented with multiple fields called “total” because that’s what was in the last row.

Check out tomorrow's tip which will also help you use Excel more effectively.

Happy computing!

No comments:

Post a Comment

Named Cells and Ranger in Excel

Great Computer Tips Named Cells and Ranges in Excel Naming cells Cells already have names such as A1, B27, etc. but you can also give them n...