How to wrap text in Excel - 3 ways to move a word to a new line

By Oleg Tolochko, published on 2023-08-23
How to wrap text in Excel - 3 ways to move a word to a new line

When working with Excel, if you need to place a large amount of text in a cell or format the text output on several lines, you need to set up a word move to a new line. There are three main ways to do this - let's take a look at them.

Automatic

Excel has a standard tool to automatically wrap text to a new line based on the cell width. When activated, words will be moved to a new line so that the content takes up the minimum number of lines but still fits in the cell width. 

To enable automatic text wrap, select the cell or range, go to the Home tab in the main menu, and click on Wrap Text in the Alignment group. The content should then occupy several rows so that it does not extend beyond it.

example automatic text wrapping

If automatic wrapping has already been applied to part of the selected cells and part has not, you may need to click again.

In addition, automatic wrapping may not work if the line has a fixed height. In this case, text that exceeds the height limit will simply not be displayed.

Example of cropping text in a cell when automatic text wrap is enabled in Excel

To make the wrapping work, you need to set the cell to automatically change its height based on the size of the content. To do this, in the Home tab of the Cells group, select Format > AutoFit Row Height.

set auto line height in Excel

Manually

The above method allows you to set line breaks automatically, but sometimes you need to set line breaks in specific places. This is also easy to do - just replace the space character with a carriage return character on a new line.

To do this, switch to the cell editing mode. Click on it twice or press the F2 hotkey or click on the formula bar. Then use the Alt+Enter keyboard shortcut to insert a line break symbol.

To display manually placed line breaks, you must also enable the «Wrap Text» mode for the cell.

In formulas

In case you need to make a document or list template with formulas, you can use a function that calls a line break character inside a formula - CHR(10). To do this, connect strings or cell references to each other using the & (ampersand) character and the CHR(10) function between them.

You can also use a line break character inserted in double quotes as text, but it is not so convenient. The formula increases in height and when the formula is later opened by another person it will be difficult for him to understand it. Therefore, it is better to use CHR(10). Formula examples:

=A1&CHR(10)&B1&CHR(10)&C1

Or

=A1&"
"&B1&"
"&C1

VBA

In macros, you may also need to insert multi-line text into a cell. To do this, we use the familiar CHR(10) function. The text wrap will be enabled automatically. The macro will look like this:

Sub INSERT_MULTILINE_TEXT()
	Range("A1").Value = "Line 1" & chr(10) & "Line 2"
End Sub

I think we've covered all the possible options for wrap text in Excel. I hope this article was useful and will help you to solve your work tasks.

Written by Oleg Tolochko
Owner, author and editor of the ITWebMind.com

Since 2021 I have been working on freelancing, mainly in the field of advertising, development and promotion of websites. I am interested in programming, in particular Python, PHP, JS to a greater extent for myself and automation of my projects. Also design, SEO, context and targeted advertising, productivity, various areas of management. I am fond of playing guitar, horses, snorkeling. Traveling in Asia at the moment. In this blog I collect my work experience for myself and others, as well as improve my skills in design, website development and promotion, copywriting.

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