Automatic Row Height For Merged Cells with Text Wrap

Tried this tip. The row does not automatically resize until you select the row and choose the autofit option or by doublclicking at the bottom of the row number.

The sheet is protected but the cells in the row are not. When autofit is applied the rows resize but if the content of the cell changes (to more or less), the row does not resize automatically to reflect the changes.

I'm sure I'm doing something wrong but it just doesn't do what is needed automatically.

Allen, thanks very much for this clever tip and your many other Word and Excel tips that have helped me over the years! Your clear writing style and your website's lack of distractions are also much appreciated.

Thank you, you saved my day, brilliant solution!
Don't forget to set the limitation to 255 on xW, because Excel will drop an error message on column width limitation.

Hi, this is a great tip. Is there any version of this for when you have rows that are merged instead of columns? If I do the above then I end up with the first merged row really big but then the other rows not changing, and if there is info in other columns for these rows then the merged one has a lot of white space. Thank you!!

Thank you so much Allen for all your tips. My knowledge in Excel & Word have greatly improved. Much appreciated.

Great work around!

Oh so close for me, I 'm having the same issue with the non-macro method, as Christi from earlier in the comments.

When I enter the text into the merged cell and press enter the text wraps but the row height isnt updated unless I click back into the cell and press enter.

Anyone know how to get around that so that the row height sets when text is first entered into the cell.

Thanks

Kanishka

Brilliant! Thank you!

The macro suggested by this Tip is generalized in the following VBA:

Sub SetRowHeightByCell()
    Dim rMA As Range, rCol As Range, rRow As Range
    Dim nR As Long, xW As Double, xX As Double
    With ActiveCell
        Set rMA = .MergeArea
        nR = rMA.Rows.Count
        If .WrapText Then
            For Each rCol In rMA.Columns
                xW = xW + rCol.ColumnWidth
            Next rCol
            rMA.UnMerge
            xX = .ColumnWidth
            .ColumnWidth = xW
            .Rows.AutoFit
            .ColumnWidth = xX
            xX = .RowHeight / nR
            rMA.Merge
            For Each rRow In rMA.Rows
                rRow.RowHeight = xX
            Next rRow
        ElseIf nR = 1 Then
            .Rows.AutoFit
        Else
            rMA.UnMerge
            .Rows.AutoFit
            xX = .RowHeight / nR
            For Each rRow In rMA.Rows
                rRow.RowHeight = xX
            Next rRow
            rMA.Merge
        End If
    End With
End Sub

Compare with the SetColumnWidthByCell macro described in my recent comment here:
https://excelribbon.tips.net/T011302_Widening_a_Column_to_a_Particular_Cells_Width.html
Both macros are available at My Excel Toolbox:
https://sites.google.com/view/MyExcelToolbox/

Allen- long time appreciator of your tips. This one in particular helped me out of a problem that I had unsuccessfully tried to solve with VBA. Thank you for being so generous with your knowledge and know how.

Hi Allen, for years I've been trying to solve this, your solution works wonders ! Thanks a lot!!!

Hi Allen,
I have been struggling with this for some time and your help column idea is great and works but I needed something for varying range widths.
I wrote a macro that loads a modeless userform with one textbox which is set to autofit and is filled with the text for that merged area, it then sets the textbox width to the merged area width.
The textbox height is used to calculate the row height using the font size of that range .
Sounds complicated but works; all I do is run the macro for those ranges.

Hello Allen,

This is just so simple yet effective tip. This has helped me a lot.
Thanks.

BR,
Girish

Hi, i've been trying to get this working too but do run into issues.
This is the Function I wrote and use:

Public Function count_TextLines(myText As Variant) As Integer
' Counts the lines by comparing the contents by the themselves after removing
' the line brakes which is character 10.
' This gives back the number of breaks so we add 1 to get the number of lines,
' since the last line doesn't have a line break.
count_TextLines = IIf(Len(Trim(myText)) = 0, 0, (Len(myText) - Len(Replace(myText, Chr(10), "")) + 2))
End Function

What is does is count the carriage feeds chr(10) and based on that returns the number of lines of text + 2, but that does not always work because the text passed is through a userform and when wordwrap is set the to true in the textbox the linefeed is not counted so what I really need ti find out is how much characters per line are needed for each line of text in a merged range before it wrap.
Probably count the characters and based upon the font size or something like that.

Thanks for reading
Hans
"IT" Always crosses your path...

The following software is an Excel add-in with the height adjustment function of merged cells.

Please download AutoFitRowEx from below URL.
https://github.com/toowaki/AutoFitRowEx/releases

To adjust the height, you need to copy the cell to another sheet, adjust the height, and then reflect that height in the actual cell height.

It's amazing how many shortcomings exist in Excel that have been ignored by Microsoft through hundreds or thousands of updates. I have been using this auto row height workaround for years, and I just shared the exact same steps with a friend before I found your post. However, I have found that Column Z needs to be slightly wider than the two merged cells combined. I surmised that Excel has some built-in cell margins or border widths that slightly skew the cell width. For example, I just merged two cells that measure 8 pixels each, but my Cell Z needed to be 16.2 pixels. I just drag the width of Z slightly until the contents wrap exactly like the merged cells. As the contents of the merged cells changes, the width of Z may need to be tweaked, but it can be perfected after a couple iterations.

This approach only works if the source cells don't contain indents. Use the '=' approach drops the indents and the resulting row heights are off from the desired row heights.

I've found a working vba to solve this issue quickly here...https://www.mrexcel.com/board/threads/auto-adjust-row-height-merged-cells.556709/

Here is the code

Dim NewRwHt As Single
Dim cWdth As Single, MrgeWdth As Single
Dim c As Range, cc As Range
Dim ma As Range
Dim ProtectStatus As Boolean

With Target
If .MergeCells And .WrapText Then
ProtectStatus = Me.ProtectContents
If ProtectStatus Then Me.Unprotect "password"
Set c = Target.Cells(1, 1)
cWdth = c.ColumnWidth
Set ma = c.MergeArea
For Each cc In ma.Cells
MrgeWdth = MrgeWdth + cc.ColumnWidth
Next
Application.ScreenUpdating = False
On Error Resume Next
ma.MergeCells = False
c.ColumnWidth = MrgeWdth
c.EntireRow.AutoFit
NewRwHt = c.RowHeight
c.ColumnWidth = cWdth
ma.MergeCells = True
ma.RowHeight = NewRwHt
cWdth = 0: MrgeWdth = 0
On Error GoTo 0
Application.ScreenUpdating = True
If ProtectStatus Then Me.Protect "password"
End If
End With


This code works well for all the merged cell where text wrap is on.

However, I want to exclude some specific merged cell from autofit even when the wrap text is on.
For example, Range C5:C8 and Range E3:E7 are two merged cells with wrap text on, and I want to exclude these two merged cells from autofit.
Is it possible to do so by adjusting the above macro. Please help if possible! I'll really be thankful.

This almost works but once I enter data into the merged cells, the content wraps but the row height does not immediately adjust. I have to double click the cell and press enter again. Then it works. Any thoughts?

Nice one