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Widen an Excel Column

 

To widen a column, do the following:

  • Move your mouse pointer up to the letter A
  • The pointer will be in the shape of a white cross, as in the next image

  • Now move your mouse pointer, the white cross, to the line in between the A and the B
  • The mouse pointer will change shape again
  • The mouse pointer will be in the shape of a black cross with arrowheads, like the one in the image below:

  • When you mouse pointer changes shape, hold down your left mouse button
  • Keep it held down and drag your mouse to the right
  • Let go of the mouse button when your are satisfied with the width of your colum
 
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Widening an Excel Column
The Result

You can widen a row in exactly the same way.

We'll now see how to centre those numbers in their cells, and format that text a little.

 

Formatting cells

Centring text in a cell comes under the heading of Formatting. Things like making the text bold, changing the font, and adding some colour also come under Formatting. There is a menu in Excel devoted to the subject - the Format menu. Let's start with centring the data in the cells.

Before you can Format any cell data, you have to "tell" Excel which cells you want to change. You do this by highlighting the cells. To highlight cells, do the following:

  • Position your mouse pointer over cell A1
  • Make sure the pointer is in the shape of a thick white cross
  • Hold down your left mouse button
  • Keep the left mouse button held and drag downwards
  • Let go of the left mouse button when all four cells are highlighted
  • Your spreadsheet will look like the one below

As you can see, the cells A1, A2, A3, and A4 are a different colour to the other cells, which are white. Our four cells also have the darker border around them. This is because they are highlighted. Once cells have been highlighted, you can do something with them. We'll format the cells we've highlighted.

In the next part, we'll see how to centre data in the cell.

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