From the course: Excel Essential Training (Microsoft 365)

Adjusting row heights and column widths

From the course: Excel Essential Training (Microsoft 365)

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Adjusting row heights and column widths

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- [Instructor] There are many times when you work with Excel that you need to adjust the width of columns. Fortunately, many of these are automatic. But if you were searching for the features that allow you to make these adjustments, you might be going to the Home tab up in the ribbon. And off to the right under Format, you might have discovered some of these choices here. But it's going to be a lot easier if we don't use these. Not that they're wrong, but many of the adjustments that we make regarding column width and row height can be done with the mouse and no commands. Simple little example might be, suppose someone else was working with this worksheet and just didn't adjust the column width. So manually, what I'm going to do right now, and you can certainly do this any time you want manually. If I point to the right boundary of Column B, between the letters B and C, can hold down the left mouse button. Drag to the right, make that wider. Now, maybe I did this with another column, too. Maybe the numbers are bigger. For whatever reason. So, many of these are of different width. Couple of options. Sometimes, you simply click and drag to make a column wider. Simple, easy. Or narrower. With numeric columns, you'll quickly discover if you make a column too narrow, at some point you'll see a bunch of hashtags. You haven't really lost the data, just make the adjustment, make it wider. But rather than doing this one by one, many times when we're adjusting columns, particularly in a scenario like this where many of the columns are likely to be the same or we want them to be the same, we can hold down the left mouse button and drag across multiple columns. We can point to any of these boundaries. Hold down the left mouse button. Now, you'll see the term Width in Pixels. Probably almost nobody cares exactly what those numbers are, although sometimes you're comparing them maybe with another worksheet. But if I just drag to a certain width here and release the left mouse button, all those columns are going to be the same width. And sometimes you say, "I might want to make all these wider." Okay, well, make them all wider. If you want them all to be what we call autofit, you double click a boundary. Now, sometimes you'll do this with one column or many columns. Autofit means make the column wide enough to display all the entries properly. Double click. They're all narrower than they used to be. Column H here has numbers that jump into the thousands. The others don't. If I do a double-click right here. Now, rarely do I really care how many pixels wide it is, but if I put the mouse right on the border there, it says 118. Over here, this is 99 pixels. So at different times, you have different reasons for wanting to make columns wider. In Column A here, I could make this narrower. I probably don't want this text to hang over, but that doesn't hurt. Notice what happens with text entries. Sometimes they'll display rightward if that cell over there is empty. So, you want to have the feeling that you can always make adjustments here. Rarely do you worry about row height. Now, if I click on this title here and use a larger font size, watch the row height or smaller font size adjust. So yeah, don't even worry about it. But even there, if you somehow said, "I want this to be taller," you can point to the boundary between 1 and 2, click and drag downward, and that's taller. So, you can adjust these at will. Now, an extreme example, and let's say this would probably not happen that often. I'm making Column B super narrow. I'm making Column E super wide, and Column H super wide and so on and so on. Let's adjust all of them at once. What do we do? Click in the upper-left corner and double click a boundary. Click, click. And all of them are adjusted. Now, sometimes you might have a title here, and many of you perhaps have not used this just yet. This is actually a special kind of title. And it's in one giant cell. And that's unimpacted by these column adjustments. In other words, it gets ignored as we adjust these columns. Another option here you could be using. If you wanted to print this out as a handout and leave spaces for annotations here, rather than putting in a bunch of empty rows, why don't we just take all these rows here, highlight them, and make them maybe twice as tall? Point to any boundary between rows, drag down, make them as tall as you want. Release. They're all taller. And if we were to print that, there'd be enough space there for annotations. So, a variety of techniques for making columns adjusted and rows adjusted. We don't even have to use commands. These various dragging, clicking, and double-clicking techniques work just fine. And one more fix here. We want to return this more or less to normal. We'll click on the upper-left corner. Double-click any boundary between row numbers. Click, click. There we are.

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