How to wrap text in Excel sheets

Sometimes text in the spreadsheet cell is too long and, as a result, is not fully shown or exceeds the borders of the cell. To make the text fully visible and keep your Excel sheet looking neat, you can wrap it. Here’s how to do it in ONLYOFFICE Docs spreadsheet editor.

What is text wrapping in Excel spreadsheets

With text wrapping, you can fit in as much information as you want in your spreadsheet and include whole sentences and paragraphs, and even multiple paragraphs in your tables. This can be useful for a variety of purposes: preparing an Excel social content plan with ready posts, leaving extended comments in electronic reports, or creating special purpose forms in spreadsheets.

How does it work? Essentially, when you wrap the text, instead of going beyond the cell border it continues from the next line as many times as required without changing the width of the area. This way, the whole text is always shown in the cell no matter how long it is.

When you apply this setting, however, the content must be accommodated somewhere, so the cell height will increase with each new line of text. To keep it readable, you must still maintain adequate column width.

You can apply wrapping to a single cell, as well as to the whole column. The latter will save a lot of time when you have similar texts in the column, as well as ensure automatic formatting for the content you add in the future.
Let’s discover how it works.

How to wrap text in a cell

To wrap text in a cell, first you need to select the desired cell to apply new settings to it.

Go to the Home tab and click the Wrap Text icon.

Now the content of the cell is fully shown and fit within the column width.

How to wrap texts in multiple Excel cells automatically

If may want to apply text wrapping to multiple cells, whole rows, or an entire Excel sheet in case you have extensive information in other parts of your spreadsheet.

To do that, select the needed range you want to enable the setting for:

• To select the whole spreadsheet, click Ctrl + A.
• To select a row or a column, click on its header.
• To select custom range, click and press one of the cells within it and drag the selection across the spreadsheet. You can also set the range to select manually in the field left from the function field.

When the selection is done, use the same action button on the top toolbar to apply wrapping.

To make the sheet look more accurate and fit more data within the screen for easier viewing, you can adjust the width of the column that contains the texts before wrapping them.

How to disable text wrapping

You can disable the setting for any desired areas of the spreadsheet. Just select the cell, range, column, or row where you want to revert wrapping and click the same button on the toolbar.

What if text is still partly hidden?

The height of the row changes automatically when you wrap text or adjust column width. However, if a row has a fixed height, this mechanism will not work.

To disable the setting, select the row and right-click its header. Then click Set Row Height in the context menu and choose Auto Fit Row Height option.

Alternatively, you can just loosen the restriction by changing the height limit via Custom Row Height setting in the same menu section.

What happens when I add more text to the cell?

If you add more content, the text will continue to extend to the new lines without changing the column width. The row height, however, will grow unless you set a custom height.

How to wrap text manually

You can also wrap text manually to ensure that your sentences are split in a way you want. This is especially useful when you are typing text right in the cell rather than inserting the ready text.

To begin from a new line, make sure the cursor is positioned where you want to split the text, then use the Alt + Enter shortcut.

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