Concepts

Why does the computer sometimes cut the end off my text labels?

Notice in the figure above the text in cell A4 has been truncated, but the text in cell A5 seems to span two cells. How does Excel treat text entered into a cell? What happens if the text is longer than the current width of the cell?

Excel was designed to react in a way that is least confusing in the most common situation. If the text value of a cell is longer than the width of the cell, and the adjacent cell to the right is empty, the text will overlap the neighboring cell. If the cell to the right has a value in it, the end of the text is cut off. The column doesn't automatically widen to accommodate the widest value in the column. You can, however, resize the column manually from the column header, or using the Column/Width... command from the Format menu.

Another option for displaying text values that are longer than the cell width is to use Wrap text. Wrap text is an option available from the Alignment tab on the Format/Cells... menu:

Here is what the spreadsheet image from above looks like after this alignment option has been set for the cell A4.

Note: All cells in the same row must have the same height, and all cells in the same column must have the same width. Order in the universe is dependent on this.