There are many situations in which you may want to wrap text in Excel cells, so that you can improve the appearance of, or easily view long text strings.

Without the wrap text feature, if the contents of an Excel cell are too long to be displayed, one of two things will happen instead. Either the text string will be displayed over the top of the adjacent cells, or, if the adjacent cells contain values, the displayed text will be cut off at the cell boundary. These cases are shown in cells A1 - A2 of the spreadsheet below, while cell A3 shows the same text string with the wrap text option enabled.

Switching on the Wrap Text Option

To switch on Wrap Text in an Excel cell:

• Use the mouse to right click on the cell and select Format Cells...
• From the Format Cells window, select Alignment tab
• Tick the Wrap Text option and click OK

Forcing Line Breaks

You can also cause the Wrap Text option to be switched on, by forcing a line break in a cell.

To do this:

• Put the cell into write mode (i.e. double click on the cell or select the cell and then either press F2 or click on the formula bar)
• Place your curser at the point where you want a line break and press ALT-ENTER (ie. press the ALT key and while holding this down, press the Enter/Return key)

Resizing Cells with Wrapped Text

If you wrap text in a single Excel cell, depending on your settings, the height of the cell may or may not automatically adjust, to show the whole of the wrapped text. If the cell height does not automatically adjust, you can force it to do this by double clicking on the row labels at the left hand side of the spreadsheet.

For example, to auto-adjust the height of row 1, double click on the line between rows 1 and 2 of the spreadsheet, in the greyed label area at the left of the spreadsheet (see right).

Resizing Merged Cells with Wrapped Text

Note that the auto-sizing of cells does not work with merged cells. If you have wrapped text in a merged cell, you will need to resize the cell manually, by dragging the bar between the row titles to the desired height.