How to change default row height

[rmt131]

Hello,

I thought I'd share a cludge-fix I found for one of Excel's more annoying non-features: inability to set a default row height and still allow the occasional row that requires more space (i.e., one of it's cells has multiple lines of wrapped text) to AutoFit if necessary.

Say you have the data shown in NormalSettings.png in an Excel file (see attachments) and you want to have a little more room between the shorter rows, but not have them all set as big as the expanded rows. One way to do this in bulk is to select the entire spreadsheet and set a fixed row height, but this chops off any cells that require more space than your default height (see FixedRowHeight20.png). The only way to fix this is to manually scan through your sheet and individually select all rows with cells that need more room than your preferred row height and AutoFit them (good luck if your spreadsheet is any size...) . If you try selecting the entire sheet and choose Format-Row-Autofit, you're back to the crowded display shown in 'NormalSettings.png'.

My workaround to this annoying problem is this: choose a column that you're not using (I just select the very last column in the sheet by holding down CTRL and pressing the right arrow until the screen stops moving) and highlight the entire column by selecting the column header. Then increase the font size for that column...voila, even your blank rows will now AutoFit to the new font size rather than the font size you are using for your data...effectively increasing your default row height without sacrificing AutoFit capabilities. I find that using 16 as a dummy font size makes my data (which is font size 10, Arial) look nicely spaced out, but experiment and try stuff until you find what you like!

Hope this is helpful to someone out there...

regards,
rmt131

[atmob]

Thank you! Have been hunting for a solution to this problem, and you provided the only one that does what is desired!