AutoFit in Excel

By default, Excel columns are 65 pixels wide. But if you have a longer string of characters in a cell, they won’t fit. Fortunately, this is easy to adjust with a feature called AutoFit. Let’s learn how to use AutoFit in Microsoft Excel.

How to AutoFit a Column in Excel

Imagine that you have a cell in Excel, and you type in the word Constantinople. You’ll notice that, when you use the default width of 65 pixels, the text spills into an adjacent cell. This can quickly get messy, and it’s hard to read.

This is where AutoFit in Excel comes in. Think of a column with multiple lengthy character strings in its cells. AutoFit automatically judges the longest cell in a column, and then adjusts the column width to fit it, and therefore all other cells.

To use AutoFit, click on the column header to select the entire column. In this example, that’s the B just above column B.

Then, with the full column selected, go to the Home tab on Excel’s ribbon. Find the Format dropdown, and from it, click on AutoFit Column Width.

Excel will automatically adjust the width of your column to fully encompass the longest character string found within that column. This helps ensure that all of your content will be readable.

How to AutoFit Multiple Columns in Excel

Imagine now that you have multiple columns that you want to AutoFit. There’s no reason to adjust them one by one.

Begin by selecting the first column in the series. Then, hold down Shift on your keyboard, and click on the column header for the last (rightmost) column that you want to AutoFit. Watch as Excel selects the full range of columns.

Finally, repeat the AutoFit process, and all of the selected columns will update at once. As you can see, Excel makes it easy to update columns with AutoFit.