Chapter 3: Essential Worksheet Operations
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To hide rows or columns in your worksheet, select the row or rows that you want to hide by
clicking in the row or column header. Then right-click and choose Hide from the shortcut
menu. Or, you can use the commands on the Home ➪ Cells ➪ Format ➪ Hide & Unhide
drop-down list.Tip
You also can drag the row or column’s border to hide the row or column. You must drag the border in the row
or column heading. Drag the bottom border of a row upward or the border of a column to the left. n
A hidden row is actually a row with its height set to zero. Similarly, a hidden column has a column
width of zero. When you use the navigation keys to move the cell pointer, cells in hidden rows or
columns are skipped. In other words, you can’t use the navigation keys to move to a cell in a hid-
den row or column.Unhiding a hidden row or column can be a bit tricky because selecting a row or column that’s hid-
den is difficult. The solution is to select the columns or rows that are adjacent to the hidden col-
umn or row. (Select at least one column or row on either side.) Then right-click and choose
Unhide. For example, if column G is hidden, select columns F and H.Another method is to choose Home ➪ Find & Select ➪ Go To (or its F5 equivalent) to select a cell
in a hidden row or column. For example, if column A is hidden, you can press F5 and specify cell A1
(or any other cell in column A) to move the cell pointer to the hidden column. Then you can choose
Home ➪ Cells ➪ Format ➪ Hide & Unhide ➪ Unhide Columns.Changing column widths and row heights ................................................................
Often, you’ll want to change the width of a column or the height of a row. For example, you can
make columns narrower to accommodate more information on a printed page. Or you may want
to increase row height to create a “double-spaced” effect.Excel provides several different ways to change the widths of columns and the height of rows.Changing column widths ................................................................................
Column width is measured in terms of the number of characters of a fixed pitch font that will fit into
the cell’s width. By default, each column’s width is 8.43 units, which equates to 64 pixels (px).Tip
If hash symbols (#) fill a cell that contains a numerical value, the column isn’t wide enough to accommodate
the information in the cell. Widen the column to solve the problem. n
Before you change the column width, you can select multiple columns so that the width will be the
same for all selected columns. To select multiple columns, either click and drag in the column bor-
der or press Ctrl while you select individual columns. To select all columns, click the button where
the row and column headers intersect. You can change columns widths by using any of the follow-
ing techniques.