How to Force Text to the Next Line in Google Sheets

If you type a lot of text into a cell in Google Sheets, there’s a good chance that much of it won’t be visible. While there are ways to resize columns in Google Sheets, you may not wish to make your columns any wider than they currently are.

One way to make your data visible without affecting the width of your columns is by using a feature called text wrapping. This will force data in a cell to additional lines in the cell. This increases the height of the row to accommodate the data in the cell, but will leave the column at its current width.

How to Use Text Wrapping in Google Sheets

The steps in this article were performed in the desktop version of Google Chrome. This guide is going to have you select a cell containing more text than is currently visible in the cell, then changing a setting so that that overflow text is displayed on new lines in the cell. Note that this is going to increase the height of the entire row of cells in which this cell is located.

Step 1: Sign into Google Drive and open the Sheets file containing the cell with the text that you wish to wrap.

Step 2: Click on the cell to select it.

force text to next line in google sheets cell

Step 3: Select the Text wrapping button in the toolbar above the spreadsheet.

choose the text wrapping button

Step 4: Choose the Wrap option. It’s the middle button on this dropdown menu.

how enable text wrapping google sheets

Do you have a row in your spreadsheet that you would prefer not be visible, but you aren’t quite ready to delete it? Find out how to hide a row in Google Sheets so that you or anyone else looking at the sheet doesn’t see the cells in that row, but you can still use those cells in formulas, or you can make that data visible in the future if you decide you need it.

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