From the course: Excel 2016: Tips and Tricks

Adjust all or selected column widths or row heights in a flash

From the course: Excel 2016: Tips and Tricks

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Adjust all or selected column widths or row heights in a flash

- [Voiceover] Any time you need to adjust column widths and row heights, you can pretty much avoid most of the menu commands, and use double clicking and dragging techniques. We're looking at a worksheet called Employees. For whatever reason, it looks like the rows: 2, 3, 4, 5 are taller than some of the others. That's a concern. The columns might look okay, but it looks like some of our data in column C is clipped off. If we want to make each column be wide enough to handle everything in the column, and that feature is sometimes called best fit, we can actually click in the upper left corner, and simply double click any boundary between column letters. I'm about to double click, right here as I point to the boundary between columns A and B, between the letters, double click. The column widths are adjusted, and as we scroll up and down, we can see all the content in each column. Now, I'm going to purposely make a change this way. Anytime, a number column is too narrow, you're either going to see scientific notation, or possibly pound signs, and people not familiar with that, and some people aren't, panic time, but we would easily readjust these by simply dragging across just these two, double click either here or there, makes no difference. There could be times too as you're looking at this data where you say, "Well, I want the rows to all be the same." Click in the upper left corner, double click the boundary between any two rows. Now, nothing seems to happened there. And what does that suggest? Possibly, there is other data in this row, maybe off to the right of a different style. There's some bold print. Is this of a different font size? On the Home tab, what do we see? This is 11 size font. Over here, it's 10 size font. That's strange, you'd think it'd be the same. So, sometimes we need to click in the upper left corner, maybe make the font sizes all be the same, for starters. 11. That seems to have fixed everything. Just to make sure, okay. Click in the upper left corner, double click a boundary, looks like everything is the same now. Now, sometimes you'll be working with data like what we're seeing over here over in column T. What if one of these columns was wider? Now, possibly you made it wider because at one point you had a bigger number, or maybe just had it that way because you wanted it to look that way because you had data below that you wanted to see. Something like that. Sometimes, you might be saying something like this, "I'd like to make all these columns here "be exactly the same width." Now, most of the time we don't care how wide a column is. If you point to a column boundary, hold down the left mouse button, you see its width, 8.57, 65 pixels. Who cares, really? But since all these are selected, if I drag this a little bit to the right, a little bit to the left maybe, I'll say let's make it 69 pixels. I'm doing this for all six columns at the same time. They are all exactly the same width. Now, if there has been other data below, and someone wasn't paying attention, or this got copied from other locations, that columns too narrow, that columns too wide. Let's clean these all up at once. Maybe work with this one, too. What if we say to all of these, let's make these all be that so called best fit. Double click a boundary between any two letters, makes no difference which two letters. Just double click, and now these are all the appropriate width. On the other hand, if we point to these January through June entries, these are all 64 pixels. As we click here, 64. Column AA has a value that goes over 1,000. So, it's wider. It's 75 pixels, and nothing wrong with that, but if you wanted them all to be 75 pixels wide, drag across here, simply take this entry, drag it to the right, drag it to the left, right back there, and now all of those are the same width. I made them 76. Each one is 76. So, at different times you have that need. Requires no use of commands. Just simple dragging and highlighting, double clicking, or dragging. If we wanted this to be a little more readable, in fact, for printing purposes, we might want to consider this, we could click in the upper left corner, and make all of the rows be taller. By clicking the upper left corner, we are selecting the entire worksheet. We take any row boundary between the numbers, click and drag, make that a bit taller maybe. All the rows are taller. A little more white space there, and possibly that's going to look better if we print it too, and sometimes it could be better too just for visual purposes. So, we can adjust row heights. Much more likely to adjust column widths, but we have the capability of adjusting all column widths at once, so called best fit, or in those situations where we want identical width, simply use the feature as we used it over here. Highlight the cells in question, drag a boundary to a certain width, let go of the mouse, and all those columns are exactly the same width. Easy to get to without commands.

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