Learning how to wrap text in Google Sheets is a fantastic skill that helps you take your spreadsheets to the next level. It’s one of those underrated skills that show just how particular you are with the details in your presentation. Being able to clearly see your text, information, or any data on your spreadsheet is a massive plus to productivity.
With that said, there are a couple of ways that you can go about wrapping text in Google Sheets.
3 Ways to Wrap Text in Google Sheets
- Wrap text through format tab
- Wrapping text through the toolbar
- Manually wrapping your text
Each method has its perks, especially the third one where you can manually wrap your own text. With that said, we’ll cover all of this later on in a step-by-step guide. We’ll also provide examples and sample spreadsheets that you can download so you can try this out for yourself.
With that said, don’t be intimidated to follow this article if you’re new to Google Sheets. These steps are beginner-friendly and should be easy for you to go over.
Let’s get started!
What Is Wrap Text in Google Sheets?
Well, if you’ve never tried having your cells overlap each other, then this feature might be useless to you. Wrapping your text is a feature that lets Google Sheets display the information in your cells completely. For example, if you have two cells that have way more text than the width of those cells, then they will both cut off and overlap. You can see this happen in the picture below:
Episode IV and Episode V were cut off, and Episode VI overlapped the next cells at the E column. Now, with text wrap, we can get this result instead:
Doesn’t that look much better? You can read all the text in the cells, and they aren’t overlapping or cut off. With that said, there’s definitely a time and place for either wrapping text or extending your columns. If you have too many cells that look cramped, you might want to extend those columns instead of solely relying on the wrap text feature.
Here’s a good rule of thumb as to when you should text wrap your cells:
- If your text is overlapping the cell to its right.
- If the text in your cells is already cut at the end, hiding the rest of the contents from your view.
- If you manually want to arrange a text in a certain way, creating a line break whenever necessary.
These three simple rules are just general suggestions, so don’t feel obligated to strictly follow them. Your discretion and personal judgment will provide a much better indication as to when you should text wrap. Now that you know the importance of wrapping your text, let’s start going over the three ways you can wrap text in Google Sheets.
Method 1: Wrap Text Using The Format Tab
In this method, we’ll be using the wrap text feature through the Format tab. Thankfully, once you’ve set a cell to wrap text, it will automatically do that with any length of text in the cell. Now, there are two different ways to go about automatically wrapping the text of your cells, so this is just one of two ways.
Here’s how you can text wrap using the Format tab.
Step 1: Open up your test spreadsheet file.
You can start by opening up a brand new spreadsheet on Google Sheets or using one you already have. Feel free to edit your personal spreadsheets directly, since text wrapping isn’t too complicated. Alternatively, you can also simply create a brand new copy of the spreadsheet used in this method, so you can follow along closely.
Step 2: Highlight the cells you want to wrap text.
Before anything, we’ll have to start by selecting the cells with text that need to be wrapped. For this tutorial, simply left-click and drag your selection between the cells B4 to B6. Of course, for the ones who are using a personal spreadsheet, you’ll have to highlight your columns or rows depending on your needs.
Step 3: Wrap the text through the Format tab.
With the cells already highlighted, it’s time to start wrapping your text. Click on the Format tab at the top part of your screen and select Text wrapping. From there, click on Wrap.
That should wrap the cells and display all the texts in your cell blocks. Try to see if your spreadsheet now looks like the image below:
If your spreadsheet does look like this, then congratulations! You’ve successfully text wrapped your spreadsheet to display your data much better. Let’s move on to the next method.
Method 2: Using The Wrap Text in The Toolbar
While the method above might be super useful, setting your cells to text wrap does take some time. You’ll have to go to the Format tab, click on Text Wrapping, and so on. In this method, the outcome is the same, but the steps are much easier.
Let’s dive right in!
Step 1: Open a Google Sheet spreadsheet file.
Just like the previous method, you’ll still need a spreadsheet file that you can use to follow the instructions. If you already have your own document, you can use that spreadsheet instead. However, you can also just simply create an exact copy of the spreadsheet used in this method.
Step 2: Select the cells that need text wrapping.
Let’s start by highlighting the cells that need to be text wrapped. Since we’re using the same spreadsheet from the previous method, we’ll select the same cells as well. Click and drag the B4 cell to the B6 cell. For those of you with a personal spreadsheet, highlight your columns or rows depending on your needs.
Step 3: Using the wrap text button in the toolbar.
Now to the good stuff! With your cells already selected and highlighted, simply go near the top-right corner of your toolbar and select the wrap text icon. Refer to the picture below to see what we mean.
You can hover over the three icons from the dropdown menu to see what each icon means. For this method, click on the icon with the arrow that curves on the way down or the icon in the middle. That should format your cells to look like the picture below:
Voila! You’ve successfully text wrapped your cells in a much easier way! Now you can just use the icon that’s ready in the Google Sheet toolbar instead of going through the Format tab.
Method 3: Manually Adding A Text Wrap
Unlike the previous methods where the text in your cells are automatically wrapped, this one is a manual approach. In this method, well be adding a manual line break to your cells so you can control where your cells cut off.
This is useful for situations that require you to cut a sentence prematurely, to make a cell look better. Here’s how you can specify when you want a line to break.
Step 1: Open up a spreadsheet file.
Before we begin, you’ll need to open up a spreadsheet file so you can follow us through these instructions. For those of you who already have a personal spreadsheet, feel free to utilize an already-existing document for this tutorial. However, you can also create an exact copy of the spreadsheet used in this method.
Step 2: Select the cell that needs to be formatted with a line break.
Start by highlighting the cell you want to add a line break to. For the sake of this tutorial and those of you who made a copy of the document used in this step, click on B7. As you can see, “Star Wars: Episode IV – A New Hope” is cut short without the proper text wrap. However, if you wrap this the normal way, then you’ll get a result similar to the image below:
While it does look better, since you can now read the entire text, it isn’t arranged the way we would like it to be. This is a very common problem, because automatically having your text wrapped can often cause this result. Where your text is wrapped, but it looks kind of wonky. Well, instead of manually having it text wrapped, you can press Enter or F2 to edit the cell. Go to the colon after Star Wars: and press Alt + Enter. That should create a line break in the sentence, moving the rest of the text down just like the image below:
Now, simply repeat this step for all three titles of Star Wars and you should end up with this result:
Doesn’t that look much better? Congratulations on figuring out how you can add a manual line break to your spreadsheet cells by pressing Alt + Enter!
Conclusion
That about wraps up this article. Hopefully, we’ve helped teach and guide you through wrapping the text of your cells in your spreadsheet. Let’s go over a short summary of everything we covered today.
A wrap text in Google Sheets is a feature that allows you to display the entire cell’s information. You can set your cells to automatically text wrap through two methods, the Format tab and the wrap text icon in the toolbar. Alternatively, you can also add a manual line break to your cells so you can format it precise to your wants.
Hopefully, you found this article helpful!