Column widths, row heights, merging cells, and related formatting issues

- [Instructor] In Excel, when you work with column widths and row heights, many times you don't have to use the standard Excel menu. On this workbook, it's called 191-Column Widths, we've got one worksheet that's got some data in it. And I wanna readjust the columns. A lotta people adjust columns by dragging column boundaries, and nothing wrong with that. I can point to the boundary between Columns G and H, between the letters, drag it wider, make it narrower. But many times you don't even have to do that. And most of the time, even though you do see numbers popping up, 8.54, 120 pixels, most of the time, most of us don't care.

But there are a couple things we do wanna do, and we can do them more efficiently than you might be doing them. For example, the data for January through June here looks like, based on the numbers, they're all gonna be the same width. The Total column goes into the thousands, so it's likely to be different. Now, sometimes when you get data from other sources, you recognize, and I'm exaggerating here, but here I'm gonna make Column F a lot wider. I'll make Column D a bit narrower that sort of thing. And a lot of you know too, when a column is too narrow, if there are numbers in it, they turn into those hash tags, pound signs.

We see right here. But suppose the data came to you like this. You'd want to adjust them. Rather than doing this for a single column, think of this idea. Let's drag across Columns B through G. If you double-click the boundary between one or more columns, in this case, we've got multiple columns selected, we'll double-click right here, all of these columns will be exactly the same width. Or will they? Sure looks like it. Now again, we don't care about pixels really, but if we point to one of these boundaries without moving the mouse but holding down a left mouse button.

That's 99. How 'bout the one over here? That's 99. Now sometimes when you highlight cells, you say, I want them to be all a little bit wider but the same width. In this case, we'll just drag them a little bit wider, and they're all exactly the same width like this. Column H is gonna need to be wider because of the numbers. So what if we came back and highlighted these and double-clicked, what would happen? Column H is 118 pixels. Column G, you probably know what this is going to be, 99 and all the others.

So we see some quick variations there. There's another thought here, too. What if we wanna adjust all the columns? Maybe Column A which has some headings in it, make that wider. I'll make this one narrower again, just for the moment to accentuate the idea, why not adjust all columns in the worksheet at the same time? So I'll click on the upper left corner, double-click a column boundary as I did before and what happens? Probably a surprise and probably something most of us would not want. A lot of you do know. You can Merge & Center cells. There's a feature on the Home tab.

Let's do that. And why not do it for both of these, rows 1 and 2? When you highlight more than a row here and use this feature, I'm gonna use it right now. Excel gives us a message saying, Merging cells only keeps the upper left value, discards all other values. So we don't really wanna do that. If I do click Okay, watch what happens. The data that was in the second row disappears. So I'm going to press Control + Z to undo that. We can do this together if we highlight the cells separately. We'd like to center this data across here, letting go of the left mouse button now.

Holding down the Control key, we'll drag across these cells and Merge & Center. Now a lot of you might be thinking, shouldn't you readjust Column A first? Not necessarily, we don't need to. We'll do a Merge & Center, and now we'll drag across these column letters here. Double-click any column boundary, and that's probably the way we would want this to look. Adjusting row height isn't nearly as important most of time. But you might want to print this information as a handout for a meeting and provide more working space on the paper as we envision it by making some of the data double-spaced.

Now, we could insert rows here. A lot of us might highlight the cells this way, right-click, Insert. But that inserts four new rows on top. So let's undo that, Control + Z. Couple thoughts here, if we really want new rows, and I wouldn't exactly recommend it, we independently click Row 5 with the Control key Row 6, Row 7, right-click, Insert. And we can do it that way. But maybe better because we can readjust later. And once again, I'll undo with Control + Z. Let's say we highlight these cells here, then point to one of the row boundaries and somewhat arbitrarily make them about twice as tall.

And that looks pretty good. Other people might say, could you center this data in the cells, top bottom? You surely can. On the Home tab, we've got an Alignment group right here, and here's a Middle Alignment. You might want that. So, lot's of different variations here on adjusting column widths and row heights. Generally more important on the column widths, but from time to time, we even adjust row heights. Easy-to-get-to features, we don't need to use the standard menu system here. Just by double-clicking or dragging the column boundaries or row boundaries.