# Microsoft Office Application Help - Excel Help forum > Excel General >  >  Excel 2007 : Stop text in cell from overflowing.

## DarkArchon

I'm trying to stop long text from overflowing in to the next cell over, I know this question has been posed here before, but that was many years ago, and I'm hoping they fixed this in 2007. If you took a standard cell (say A1), with nothing to the right, and pasted this post into it, it would overflow and cover all cells to the right. There are two fixes I've commonly seen suggested to stop this, and neither will work.

1) Place a space in the cell to the right, the cell is no longer empty and the text to the left will end on that cell. The problem with this is it also breaks functions like counting blank cells or counting non blank cells, it won't work for me.

2) Wrap text, I really don't want to wrap text, I hate the way it looks. This method doesn't break functions, I just can't stand to have 200 characters wrapped inside a 5 character text box, it doesn't work for me.

Besides, neither are really "fixes", they are ways to work around a problem that, I believe, MS should have put an option in for long ago. The original problem remains. So is there a fix in Excel 2007?

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## mewingkitty

Format cells - Alignment - Fill

mew.

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## Andy Pope

FYI:

mewingkitty suggestion works in xl2000 and probably xl97 although I can't test that at work.

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## DarkArchon

I think you misunderstand my problem. Format -> Alignment -> (Horizontal)Fill will fill a box with repeated characters of whatever you have in the box. 

See my attachment please.

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## Andy Pope

In that case then I don't think there is a setting which will cover all variations.

If you use Justify and Top you will get what you want but only after resetting the row heights.

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## DarkArchon

Well that's disappointing.

Thanks anyway.

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## Andy Pope

Why is the overspill an issue? What are you doing exactly.

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## DarkArchon

Its only an issue in the way the spreadsheet looks, it still works the same as before. Say in the example above I had stuff in B2 and B3 and I wanted to scan down the list (visually) and see what items in col A had corresponding values in col B. It's easier on the eyes when the text starts and ends at the same position for all rows.

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## Andy Pope

I guess.
But would you not use formula rather than scanning by eye?

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## DarkArchon

It's not a large sheet, pretty easy to look at and see that A1 has nothing corresponding, A2 and 3 do, the rest don't, etc. Though the count if blank and count if not blank statements would come in helpful for getting overall numbers, but that goes back to why I'd rather not use a space.

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## guitarteacher

I know this post is old but I am trying to do the same thing.  If there is something in the adjacent cell it works fine but if it is blank then it looks just like you described it.  If you ever get the answer let me know.

Thanks

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## guitarteacher

Type a "space" in the cell just to the right of the one containing the
text..........then it will not overflow......

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## psymann

I'm aware of three methods.

The first two are in your original post, and I too found neither of these were suitable for a particular piece of work I was doing.

A third option is to set the text to full "Justify" rather than left or centre justify or whatever it's on at the moment.

The "Fill" option someone else suggested I think is similar, but that one didn't work if there was more than one column next to each other to which I wanted to apply this setting.

Setting to Justify has the unhelpful side effect of centering the text, so although it stays neatly in the cell, you see the middle of the text rather than the beginning of it.

If you want it to:
- not overflow
- be left-justified (so you can't use justify)
- not have wrapped text (so you can't use wrap text)
- not require extra columns (so you can't use column of spaces)
- be next to another column (so you can't use fill justify)
then I don't know of a solution.  But I wish there was one!

psy

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## Chris Devious

If you

(1) Select the whole sheet
(2) Click on wrap text (cells will become huge and uneven)
(3) Select the whole sheet again
(4) Click and drag on edge of row number to set the row height back to the height you want the rows - they will all adjust together.

All the long text will now run underneath the cell to the right
You may have to select the sheet and hit the 'Top align' and 'Align Text left' buttons so that top of text is showing and see the beginning of the cell entry. 

C

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