Skip to Content

How to Change Row Height in Google Sheets

In Google Sheets, there are many situations you may come across where you need to be able to change the height of your rows.

Depending on the data you have in your spreadsheet, you may want to make rows smaller or larger. You might also need to change the size of your columns, or individual cells.

In this tutorial, we will cover different ways to change your row height, column size, and cell sizes.

Table of Contents

Changing Row Height Click and Drag

The easiest way to change row height is to click and drag with your mouse. Here’s how it’s done:

  1. Take your cursor and place it on the line below the number of the row you want to change the height of
  2. Click with the left mouse button and hold
  3. Drag your mouse down to increase the height of the row, or up to decrease the height of the row
  4. Let go of your mouse as soon as you are done dragging to the desired size

Changing Row HeightS

You can use this method to change the size of multiple rows at once by highligting the rows you want changed. It also works with changing column size

Auto-fit Row Height

Sometimes you may have more text in a cell than is actually readable, so you want to be able to adjust the height of each row to show all the text.

If you have a large spreadsheet, doing this manually would take far too much time. To speed up this task, you can use Auto-fit to make it very efficient.

Auto-fit will increase the height of all the rows just enough so that all the cell text is visible.

There are two simple ways to auto-fit in Google Sheets. We will show you both methods here.

Auto-Fit Using the Mouse

One way to auto-fit is to just highlight and double-click using the mouse.

Here’s how this is done:

  1. Select the rows that you want to auto-fit the height of. You can either click, hold, and drag to highlight the rows, or if you need to select all click in the top left square or use CTRL + A on your  keyboard
  2. Double click on the line just below one of the rows that you want to auto-fit the height of
  3. This will auto-fit the height of all the rows you have selected

autofit row height

Auto-Fit Using Fit to Data Option

Another way you can auto-fit your row height to your cell data is by right-clicking and using fit to data option.

Here’s how this is done.

  1. Select all the rows you want to auto-fit the height of
  2. Right-click and select Resize rows
  3. Select the Fit to data option
  4. Select OK

resize fit to data

You can also use this resize rows option to manually specify your row height in pixels. Instead of selecting Fit to data in step 3, just enter a pixel number

Resizing Columns

Every method of changing row size that we just went over also works for increasing and decreasing the width of columns.

Changing Column Size with the Click and Drag Method

  1. Take your cursor and click and hold to the left or right of the column you want to change the width of in the top header row
  2. Drag your cursor either left or right depending on if you want to make the width smaller or larger
  3. Let go of your mouse and your width will resize

Resizing columns click and drag

Changing Column Size Using Auto-fit with the Mouse

  1. Select the columns that you want to auto-fit the width of. You can either click, hold, and drag to highlight the rows, or if you need to select all click in the top left square or use CTRL + A on your  keyboard
  2. Double click on the line to the left or right of one the cells in the top header row
  3. This will auto-fit the width of your column to account for the cell contents

Auto-fit columns

Changing Column Size Using Fit to Data Auto-fit

  1. Select all the columns you want to auto-fit the width of
  2. Right-click and select Resize resize columns
  3. Select the Fit to data option
  4. Select OK

Fit to data columns

If you want to manually enter a pixel width for your columns in step 3 you can enter a pixel size instead of selecting the Fit to data option

Closing Thoughts

Those are the easiest methods for adjusting the row and column sizes of your Google Spreadsheet.

As you continue using spreadsheets more and more you will likely encounter all different sorts of scenarios where you need to adjust your cell sizes to fit the data in the cells.

Now that you’ve learned the best methods for doing this, you should be able to customize your cell sizes with ease.

We hope you found this tutorial helpful!

More Google Sheets Tutorials:
How to Rename a Column
How to Zoom In or Zoom Out
How to Split Cells
How to Change Cell Padding
How to Distribute Columns Evenly