can a cell grow and shrink with it's contents?

using the wrap text option for a cell, is it possible to have the cell grow and shrink along with its contents?

Hi Brian,

If I format a cell to wrap text it automatically adjusts vertically based on the amount of data I enter into the cell. Are you not seeing that?

Or are you hoping to have it auto-adjust the width, too? (Which kind of defeats the purpose of using the wrap function..)

no just vertically. my sheet is only one cell wide (the length of a printed page) and yes i see that the cell grows as i type. however when i leave the cell the row returns to the normal cell size and most of my sentences disappear. is there a setting or code perhaps to keep all information visible automatically instead of me having to adjust every row when i leave it? Like the 'can grow' property in access.

Thank you,
Brian

Hmm. Mine stay the correct height when I exit them, showing the entire contents of the cell.

Are you dealing with cells that contain more than 1024 characters? Excel can hold up to 32,xxx characters in a cell, but it will only display up to 1024. In that case, the row height will only stay as high as it takes to show you the first 1024 characters, with the rest being "cut-off" from view.

i'm using 2002, my row height is set at 24 and stays at 24. i get about a sentence and the top half of the second. this has been my experience with all excel forms. be it work or home on multiple computers. would appreciate any assistance/suggestions.

Ah, I think I see what you mean now. It's because you manually set the row height to 24, the word wrap still works but it doesn't auto-fit your row height. To fix, simply double-click on the line just below the row number (in the row headings all the way at the left of the sheet). If you need to do this for multiple rows of 'wrapped' cells, select all of those rows and then double-click the line beneath any of the selected row numbers.

is there a setting somewhere to enable autofit? I've double clicked the lower row separator several times and what seems to happen is the cell shrinks to one row width (with 4 or five rows in my cell). I've tried several cells and also done the format/row/autofit selection in the tool bar (which still shrinks it). nothing makes it expand.

Do you have merged cells?

yes.....probably a bad thing huh?

Yup.

Anybody reasonably competent in Excel would like to see the feature permanently removed.

thank you all for your help