How to change column width to fit content - with a different font size

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Level 1

12 points

How to change column width to fit content - with a different font size

Hi,

I've seen a lot of other similar questions, all of them with "sort of" solutions that either point to hand ajustes or simply mention "it works here".

I think I found what the issue is. After you change your font size, close the workbook and open it again, and the "fit content to width" will work as expected: taking every line in the target range, into consideration.

I tried to add this comment to the other questions, but couldn't. Unfortunately, as good as Apple is for system software, this site seems to have a lot of limitations. Anyways, I hope this tip can be seen for future users that might face the recurring "fit to width" problem.

Posted on Oct 27, 2024 3:00 PM

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Answer 1

SGIII

Level 8

36,026 points

Oct 27, 2024 8:30 PM in response to Pinsard

Excel has "workbooks." Numbers does not. It has documents which contain sheets which contain tables, charts and other objects.

I couldn't find a 'Fit to Width' in Numbers. Perhaps you have deselected 'Wrap to off in cell' the Text tab and are referring to the 'Fit' button next to 'Width' in the Table tab? If so that button works well in Numbers 14.2 running under macOS 15.0.1. Double-clicking the vertical line between the column letters also works well to adjust the width.

Are you perhaps using Excel? Or an old version of Numbers?

SG

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Answer 2

Pinsard Author

Level 1

12 points

Oct 28, 2024 9:50 AM in response to SGIII

Workbooks vs documents; sheets vs tables; different names for the same concepts. Whatever.

If you select a column of a table, then click the "down chevron" (or should I say, arrow? hum, no. It's more like a chevron to me, as an arrow has a pointer and a body, and a tail... anyways) which is located at the right border of the selected column, there will be a "Fit Width to Content". That's what I meant, sorry if I swapped parts of the name.

Executing this "fit" command doesn't produce the expected result if you, previously, changed (normally, bumping up) the size of (or even the family of) the font used to display cells/entire column.

However, if you save the >document< and reopen it, apparently this makes Numbers invalidate internal caches and enable it to use the fresh width data in order to correctly calculate how to resize a column, to accommodate its content, taking into account all lines in the range.

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