Why doesn't Auto Fit work?

Question

Auto Fit for Row Height never seems to work for me in Excel, neither if I select it before typing, nor if I highlight cells I've typed in and then select it. How can I get it to work properly?

Answer 1

Generally, if you have set a row height manually, or if you have merged cells in your row, AutoFit will not adjust row height. This is by design.

In practice, depending on what "never seems to work" or "work properly" means for you, the displayed or printed results of AutoFit also can get poor results depending on your zoom settings, or font settings (especially if XL has to do a font substitution), or your print quality settings (set in the Page Setup dialog).

Results are generally better if you (a) stick to a font provided by MS, keep both display and print zoom at 100%, keep your print driver updated (it affects screen display as well, since XL uses the print metrics for screen layout), and adjust the print quality to be optimum with your particular printer.

Answer 2

Hi Erik,

Microsoft is open to product suggestions. Please use Excel's Help menu and choose Send Feedback to display the suggestion form.

Answer 3

Microsoft could do with taking a year out from developing new products and put everyone on to sorting out all the bugs in their old ones!  After 25 years of using their software I could tell them quite a few that still aren't fixed!

Answer 4

Actually, there is a bug in Excel.  It does not work properly.  Period.

If this is by design, it's just one more symptom of a company that is pretty good, but not as good as they think they are.

As for always keeping display and print zoom settings at 100% - well, this is 2013 and I was enlarging and shrinking way back in the 1980s.  Pretty useful feature.  We ought to be able to use that.

The problem seems to be that text placed in a cell, and completely filling the last line of the cell (so that the last character of the last line occupies the last available white space in the cell) causes autofit row height to not work.  I'm using Calibri 11 point font.

If someone at Microsoft decides this should be addressed - perhaps they could be motivated to include an option that allows users to create margins around the cell contents - similar to the option available in Word Tables.

Answer 5

Thanks for your reply.  It sounds as though getting  'auto fit' to work consistently would require a bigger brain than mine!  I guess I'll just have to live without it.  But it's a shame they couldn't make features like this work more reliably, they would be qute useful!