Making text wrap within a cell

When you want to maintain a set column width by wrapping long text entries in a cell selection onto several lines, select the Wrap Text check box in the Text Control section of the Alignment tab. You can use this control to break up a long table heading that would normally spill over several blank columns so that all its text fits within the current column width set for the data in rows below. You can also use it to effectively control long column headings that would otherwise force you to widen the columns of data much more than is necessary to just display their numerical entries.

To remedy this situation and make this table much more compact, follow these steps:

1. Select the columns that contain the long column headings.
   In this example, I selected the letters B through J in the column header.
2. Manually narrow the selected columns to the width necessary for displaying the data entries.
   For this example, with the help of the Width ScreenTip, I narrowed the selected columns to a width of 12.86 characters (95 pixels) by dragging the right border of one of the selected columns. (Here, narrowing one column automatically narrows all the other selected columns.) Doing this, of course, truncates the long column headings in the second row.
3. Select the range of cells with the long column headings that you want wrapped to the new narrower column widths.
   For this example, I selected the cell range B2:J2.
4. Open the Format Cells dialog box (Ctrl+1), select the Alignment tab, select the Wrap Text check box, and click OK.

Excel automatically wraps the column headings so that they're entirely displayed within the current column widths. At the same time, the program automatically increases the height of row 2 to accommodate these wrapped lines of text.