Argthtjtr

When I type a long sentence (or more than one sentence) into more than one cell in a row and apply the Text Wrap option to these cells, the cells have an extra blank line on the bottom of them. There are no extra spaces after my text. I have put the cursor at the end of the text and used the Delete key.

My text is formatted to be aligned to the Top and Left.

• The Auto Format Height option does not get rid of the extra blank line.


• Adjusting the width of the cell doesn't help.


• I tried copying/pasting the text into Notepad and then back into Excel to try to get rid of any formatting. That did not work.


• I am not using Bold, Italic or any other font setting. I am using the default font when I am entering the text.


• I have searched the Format Cells window. Nothing there gets rid of this extra blank line.

Is there some other setting I can use to get rid of this extra blank line? I realize that Excel isn't really made for word processing. But, I need to enter in comments on this sheet and use the Text Wrap feature.

I am using Office/Excel 2007 for Windows.

I was able to reproduce the behavior you are seeing (also in Excel 2007). I can't find a way to get rid of the extra space once it's there, but I found that if you reverse your steps and apply the Text Wrap in a cell prior to entering your text, you will not get the extra blank line.

I had the same problem just before I've typed this. And here is what I've found.

When you press wrap text the cells height is automatically adjusted. Also its height is not calculated as we expected. If there is very little space left on the last row of the text, Excel decides that the cell needs one more row... even if there is not a single letter on it.

If you get the cell's width a little wider, the automatic cell height adjustment removes the extra line.

I found that if you change the width of the column that contains the cell with the extra blank line, then auto sizing the height of the row will usually get rid of the extra blank line. Apparently word wrap messes up with particular cell values and particular widths. Try different widths until auto-sizing the height gets rid of the blank line.

You can widen the column by clicking and dragging the divider between the two column headers at the top of the worksheet. Once the column is wider, auto size the row by double-clicking the divider between the row headers on the left side of the worksheet.

Of course, if your worksheet has hundreds of rows, then each cell in that column has a certain chance of hitting the magic spot, and adding the extra line. Changing the width will clean up some cells, and add unnecessary blanks to others. In this case, the only solution that I have found is to manually wrap the text to my chosen width by inserting extra carriage returns in the middle of the text at the position that I'd like the text to wrap using alt+enter. I then make sure the column is a little wider than my chosen text width, and I won't get any extra blank lines. A terrible and labor intensive solution, but it does work.

Excel lays out text differently in wrapped cells to the way it lays it out in text boxes.

(Try it: create a text box the same width as your wrapped cell, with zero margins, check Resize shape to fit text and Wrap text in shape, and paste in a copy of the text from your wrapped cell).

Knowing this, it seems that the problem occurs because the Autofit Row Height command adjusts the height of the row as if every cell of the row is laid out using the algorithm used for text boxes rather than the algorithm for wrapped cells. Autofit Row Height also ignores merged cells, so it really isn't very usable in many situations.

Solution: put your text into text boxes rather than wrapped cells. Of course, this introduces its own world of pain, but if you generate and populate the text boxes using VBA it isn't too difficult.

I tried 6 of the 7 answers that were here (excepted the text boxing) and with a bit of fiddling the ideas all worked but, on some rows only. I'm working on an Excel 97-2003 (.xls) workbook using compatibility mode from Excel 2016 but I see 2007 has the same commands I used below...

Another thing that worked on some was to type a blank into the empty cells between the other data. Some rows were corrected by copying the formatting from a good example row, onto the problem row. Using the formatting dialog box to change all the formatting on all the data at once and reapply it also worked on a few rows. What I found that worked on all the many misbehaving rows I had left at once was to select all the data area (CTRL+HOME then CTRL+SHIFT+END will select cells that surprisingly contain invisible data too), go to the HOME tab, EDITING section, select the arrow beside CLEAR, choose CLEAR FORMATS. Then select all the data you want text wrapped and either right click or use CTRL1 to open the Formatting dialog box, alignment tab, and checkmark beside WRAP TEXT, ENTER, check the data all over for wasted lines (are there blank spaces leading or following your text?), then reapply any other formatting you were using. Voila! The end of many hours of frustration.
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Please do the following:
1. Highlight the column, control+h (to find and replace) put a space in find and put any special character to '-' to replace.
2. Convert "text to colomn", delimit with the special character replaced.

Enjoy...

I read in diagonal some answers and some are useful. Eventually after fidling with the issue I found:

• Adding text to adjacent cells also causes same symptom.

So I messed a bit more and here's the (eventual) solution - in Excel 2013:

1. Click on Column header of the "wrapped cells" to select whole column.


2. Widen the column by dragging the right divider.


3. Remove and re-add the "Wrap text" setting.

Issue should disappear. Let me know if this fixes the issue.