How to Adjust Row Heights in Excel

The video guide shows how to adjust row heights in Excel. If you create a new workbook and do not wish to set the row heights manually, Excel will auto-fit every row's height automatically. One reason you may need to manually adjust row heights is that Excel's auto-fit function does not work on merged cells. As the main reason to merge cells is to expand the available space, merged cells often require deeper rows as well.

The other big reason to manually adjust row heights is for aesthetic reasons. In Microsoft Word, the Normal spacing between paragraphs of text is equivalent to a blank row of 8 point font. When creating an Excel document, it makes sense to leave a similar gap between headings and tables, or between sections of a form. If you insert spacer rows in your spreadsheet, you will normally want to reduce their height.

You will notice that the auto-fit function does not always seem to set the rows to perfectly fit the text in column A. This is because the video has been produced at a zoom level of 201% but Excel is not able to scale the font from size 11 to size 22.11. Although good, the auto-fit function can struggle with different zoom levels and extended passages of text. Both issues can combine to cause text to go missing from printed documents where the print set-up specifies the worksheet should print over a fixed number of pages.

It should be noted that numbers cannot wrap over multiple lines and simply will not display if a cell is too small. For that reason, and because printing is more commonly constrained by page widths, our consultants would advise setting column widths before adjusting row heights.

By Ed Bolton, founder of Excel4Business Ltd. Last reviewed September 2026.