How to write paragraphs in Excel to mimic the way MS Word handles text.
- For updated video clips in structured Excel courses with practical example files, have a look at our MS Excel online training courses . You can even try the Free MS Excel tips and tricks course.
- To see if this video matches your skill level (see the suggested skill score below) do our free MS Excel skills assessment.
- If you are based in South Africa look at the live courses we offer in Johannesburg and Cape Town.
- - 03:22
- - Skill Level: 3
- - What's my skill level
Although it is preferable to write paragraphs and reports in word –often you need to print a bit of a paragraph or a report in an Excel document and it is useful to know of ways to fit the words in in the most appropriate way.So here are a couple of ways to write paragraphs in Excel like word.
The first thing we have got to bring along the sentence – goes over the columns – what we’d like to do is fit it within this column without having to make it any wider. So the first way to do that – I’m going to right click and I’m going to go – format cells and what you’ll see is we have got something called alignment and there is an option called “wrap text”. I click on it and say OK – you’ll see it fits the entire sentence into that cell by making the height of the row higher. So that is the one option. I am just going to undo.
If however, we want to specify where Excel must drop the lines down- what we can do is we go in here – so maybe that is where we want to do the next drop and we hold Alt down – the Alt button and push Enter. I will just make this a bit wider so you can see what is happening and maybe we decide that we also want to put if after the word “offer” so I hold my Alt key down and push Enter and again, for example. So now when you look at it, Excel would have normally gone and put as many words as it could here before it dropped to the next line- we have now specified exactly where we want it to be – this allows for things like bullet points and maybe dashes, for example within a cell.
A third way of doing this – perhaps you don’t want the row height to change – what you want to be able to do is write your paragraph without having to think about where it is placed – finish it – and then what you want is Excel to place it in as many cells as is required to fit within this column. It is pretty easy to do – you highlight the number of cells it can use – if we go to the Home tab- over here you will see there is a full option and at the bottom her we have got justify and when I click full justify you will see what it does is it places the line in new cells. So I am going to undo that.
If for example, we take only two cells and we try and do it, Excel warns us that that sentence cannot fit in only two cells – it is going to have to go lower – you can either cancel it or in this case we are going to say OK and you’ll see it fits it in in the allowed column widths.