How to use Shrink to fit in Excel

Abstract

One of the options grouped under Alignment is Shrink to fit.

Shrink to fit will automatically reduce the font size until text fits in a cell.

Let’s take a look.

To illustrate how Shrink to fit works, let’s look at a typical layout problem.

Here we have a basic feature table that needs some cleanup.

Let’s start by applying a horizontal and vertical alignment of center for all cells.

We don’t have a lot of long text in this table, so center alignment will work well.

Now let’s increase the row height to get some more white space into the layout.

One solution is to apply Shrink to fit to those cells.

Go to the Alignment tab of the Format Cells dialog box.

Shrink to fit is directly below Wrap text.

We can see that the font in several cells is now smaller.

And if we add more text to a cell, the text will automatically shrink as needed.

However, Shrink to fit can quickly reduce long text to an unreadably small size.

If you have the vertical space, a better option is Wrap text.

Text wrapping is not compatible with Shrink to fit.

If you enable wrapping, Shrink to fit will be disabled.

Then re-enable Wrap text.