How to hide overflowing text without populating an entire cell with the content in Excel?

When there are long text strings in cells, they will spill over to the next cells. The easiest way to prevent the text from overspilling is using the Format Cell feature in Excel. However, the drawback of this method is that when a cell contains short text, the Format Cell feature will fill the entire cell with the content, repeating as many times as necessary. Like a cell containing the text “you” may look like “youyouyou”. So, is there any way to hide overflowing text without populating an entire cell with the content in Excel? The answer is yes. In this tutorial, we will show you three methods to get the job done.

Hide overflowing text using Wrap Text

Keep text from overflowing with a space

Prevent text from overflowing using an amazing tool

To prevent text in the table below from spilling over to the neighboring cells using the Wrap Text feature, please do as follows.

1. Select the cells that you want to prevent from spilling over.

2. Go to the Home tab and click Format > Row Height in the Cells group.

3. In the popping-up Row Height dialog, keep the default row height unchanged. Then click OK.

4. On the Home tab, click the Wrap Text button in the Alignment group.

Now you can see the overflowed texts in the cells are hided and are kept from spilling over to the next cells.

Another way of preventing the overflowing text is making the neighboring cells not empty. Just enter a space in the next range or column to hide the over-spilling text. Please do as follows.

1. Select the range or the entire column next to the overflowing cells.

2. Enter a space character in it.

3. Continue to press Ctrl + Enter, so each cell of the selected range or column will be inserted a space. You can now see there is no overflowing text.

In addition to the above two methods, here I introduce to you another simple way to keep the text from overflowing. The Fill Blank Cells feature of Kutools for Excel can do the trick in a few clicks.

1. Select the range or the entire column next to the overflowing cells.

2. Go to Kutools tab, and click Insert > Fill Blank Cells.

3. The Fill Blank Cells dialog box pops up. Check the Fixed value option and type a space in the Filled value box.

4. Click the OK button. You will see the overflowing cell contents are hidden. And all selected cells are filled in with a space.