Microsoft Excel 2013 Tutorial - 12 - Fitting Text and Merging Cells Video Lecture | Microsoft Excel 2013: Be the Excel Master - Software Development

alright guys welcome back to another
video and the first thing I want to show
you guys how to do is I want to show you
a couple different options of how you
can fit text inside a cell so the reason
I want to show you guys this is because
right now
just looking at this worksheet it's
annoying me because we have a lot of
white space in this data and the reason
that we have it is because ok as soon as
I start a tutorial I swear everyone for
some reason starts texting me and it's
really annoying
I'm probably going to dropkick my phone
if I get one more text alright so the
reason that we have this white space is
because these column headers or the
column titles they're a lot longer than
the data itself and it's annoying me
because I can't fit everything inside
this one window some of its the
right-hand side and I hate scrolling so
what we can do by default is we can just
go ahead and take each of these columns
and shrink them down a little bit
however we have another problem that we
just created the column titles or
headers are now cut off so what if there
is a way to get pretty much the best of
both worlds well my friends there is if
you ever click on I don't know find the
longest one I think is this one calories
from fat go ahead and right-click the
cell and hit format cells now remember
this is the dialogue where we were
formatting numbers so we can either add
the decimal places or change it to
currency format however what we are
worried about right now is this
alignment now you can align the text in
your cell in a couple different ways we
already know about one type of alignment
and that is like pretty much if you ever
working with a word document Microsoft
Word you can align text left center
right that's what you do in this first
little area right here however what I
want to talk to you about is this text
control right here this is pretty much
where you set how exactly text is going
to fit inside a cell so what we can do
is check this wrap text right here
and hit okay now check this out
whenever I scroll in and I edit the cell
right here instead of just minimizing
this and having it cut off it actually
wraps and I'm not like boom check it out
I'm talking about like it moves to the
next line so this one is unformatted so
whenever I shrink it actually I
formatted that one as well
accidentally but basically you saw
before what it did is instead of cutting
it off now it just pretty much moves it
to a new line so that is one way that we
can pretty much have the best of both
worlds where all of the content inside
the cell still displays but at the same
time you get rid of a lot of this white
space right here pretty sweet now
another thing that I want to show you
guys how to do is how to merge cells
actually before I get to that I'll show
you guys one more thing if you format
these cells again and click alignment
you can actually click shrink to fit and
what this does is instead of just
cutting it off the smaller you shrink it
the text size or the font size actually
shrinks accordingly so again it doesn't
wrap this one is a formatted but this
one is so this is actually a good
comparison so you see how whenever I
shrink this the font size is shrinking
that is the difference between shrink to
fit wrap text and of course if we have
none of them then it just cuts off by
default so anyways as I was saying that
was just a you know a nice little tip
what I want to talk to you guys about
now is merging cells so whenever you
merge a cell actually let me go ahead
and open up another since this isn't I
don't really have anything here I can
merge alright so don't say that
let me open up crime right here so go
ahead download crime if you want to
follow along um you actually don't need
downloaded because this is going to take
like two seconds
alright so merging a cell basically
means take two or more cells and combine
them into one so this is actually merged
right here so let me unmerge it real
quick unmerge this real quick so for
example this what you're looking at
right here is pretty much some crime
data for different armed different races
it looks like so these are the crimes
these are different races in this entire
section right here is all the total
arrest information now this entire
section right here is the percent
percentage information for each crime so
what I want to do is actually take this
total arrests and have it span across
all these cells right here so what I can
do is actually copy this and paste in
each one but then it's going to say
total arrests five times so that's going
to be kind of dumb looking so instead of
just having five different cells what I
can actually do is select all of these
and go up to the top under my Home tab
alignment and I can hit merge and center
guys you guys are going to be using this
all the time what it does is it combines
all of these cells together into one big
cell and also centers whatever text was
inside there so I'll do the same over
here so you see that we have this cell
the cell the cell this cell this cell
well we actually want to combine all of
these so I'm going to select them all
hit merge and center and it takes
whatever text was in that first cell
combines all the cells I selected and it
centers it right over so now instead of
ten cells I have two nicely merged and
centered cells now as you saw at the
beginning of this little example this
merge and center it actually acts as a
toggle so if you ever want to unmerge
just click on the merge cell click
it again and unmerge is it so unmerge
those and then merge them back