Locked lesson.
About this lesson
Resize rows/columns, adjusting fonts, colors & alignment.
Quick reference
Cell Formatting
Learn how to resize rows and columns and apply style to text.
When to use
Use to learn how to format text to make data visible and visually appealing.
Instructions
Resize column or row
Method 1
Double-click column or row divider to automatically fit the column width or row height to accommodate the largest display within that column or row.
Method 2
Click, hold and manually adjust the column or row divider and drag to the desired width or height
Merge columns or rows
- Highlight the cells that you want your cell display to spill into.
- Go to the Home tab. Click “Merge and Center” from the Alignment command group.
Apply a pre-built style to a dataset
- Highlight the relevant dataset
- Go to the Home tab and click “Cell Styles” from the Styles command group
- Click on the dropdown arrow, and select a desired style from the available options
- 00:04 When you open a brand new Excel worksheet,
- 00:06 you'll get some defaults that you'll likely want to change later.
- 00:10 Here's why.
- 00:11 When you start entering data, it may not conform to the default column width or
- 00:16 row height.
- 00:17 So it may look something like this sheet, a bit jumbled and not too presentable.
- 00:22 And good looking data is almost as important as accurate data.
- 00:26 The first thing we notice on our sheet is that the word Sharpeners
- 00:29 has a few letters cut off.
- 00:32 This heading Q1 Items Sold has letters spilling over to the other column.
- 00:37 So let's fix those first.
- 00:39 The quickest way to make a column wider is to double click on the column divider
- 00:44 once we see this little black cross showing up.
- 00:48 We double click here.
- 00:49 And what it's done is to make this column as
- 00:52 wide as the widest values in the column.
- 00:56 Well, that's a bit too wide, and we'll have a solution for this title later.
- 01:01 So let's get back that little black cross, click, hold and
- 01:05 manually adjust the column width by dragging to where we want it.
- 01:10 This looks good.
- 01:12 Column E is also too narrow.
- 01:14 So we double click.
- 01:15 And it automatically adjusts the width.
- 01:18 Now we can see all of our data, but it could be more visually appealing.
- 01:22 Maybe we can start by fixing the name of this data set.
- 01:26 This title applies to all the data that we see here, so
- 01:29 it makes sense to run it all the way across.
- 01:32 We'll highlight all the columns with data, and just for this row, we'll merge them,
- 01:36 so we get a nice centered title.
- 01:39 You'll find Merge & Center on the Home tab under the Alignment group.
- 01:45 We click Merge & Center, and
- 01:46 now it's spread all the way across the first five columns.
- 01:50 Our default font and size is Calibri 11, so let's start applying
- 01:56 some style to our title since we do want it to stand out from the rest of the data.
- 02:01 We can look for the Styles command group on the Home tab, and
- 02:05 we'll see an option called Cell Styles.
- 02:08 We click on the drop down arrow, and we see a couple of options for titles and
- 02:12 headings.
- 02:13 Let's click this one for Title.
- 02:17 And it's applied.
- 02:19 The row height got automatically adjusted, but sometimes it doesn't do that.
- 02:24 And of course, we can just double click to make sure that it's the right height for
- 02:28 our text.
- 02:29 We can apply a style to the data set itself too.
- 02:32 Let's select the whole area.
- 02:34 Go back to our Cell Styles menu and we can select any of these from the gallery.
- 02:41 Let's go with a light blue to compliment our title.
- 02:46 And we can make the row and column headings stand out too.
- 02:50 We can make them bold and we can do it all at once.
- 02:53 If we want to select non-contiguous data, we select our first set of data.
- 02:58 Then press Ctrl on our keyboard.
- 03:01 And while holding down the Ctrl button, we select the other piece or
- 03:05 pieces of data that we want to perform the same action to.
- 03:10 If you're using a Mac, you'd use the Command key instead of the Ctrl key.
- 03:14 We release, we can see that both sets of data are highlighted.
- 03:18 So now we can just click on the B in the Font group of the homepage
- 03:22 to make those values bold.
- 03:26 And our data is looking better already.
- 03:28 Finally, if we wanted to make several rows the same height all at once, we just need
- 03:34 to hover over the first row until we see a black arrow and drag down to the last row.
- 03:42 We can right click, and we'll see Row Height here.
- 03:46 We see the row height is 15.
- 03:47 What if we wanted to make it just a little taller, maybe 17?
- 03:51 We see that all the selected rows have been adjusted to a row height of 17.
- 03:57 Let's undo that, we'll click Ctrl + Z.
- 03:59 There's another way to do it.
- 04:01 We could have done it manually by just getting that little black cross and
- 04:05 clicking on any one.
- 04:07 Once they're all highlighted,
- 04:09 then they'll all get adjusted to the manual height that we made it.
- 04:13 So now you know how to make your raw data look a bit more professional and
- 04:17 presentable.
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