expanding cells / pushing down row?

**Cheshire** · 01-21-2011, 04:19 PM

I'm trying to create a protected excel sheet that will be used as a form for reporting service outages.

The reason is that using word documents doesn't (or isn't set up to) allow easy polling of the data for using it in cumulative status reports.

Is it possible to have the row height automatically expand as someone types in a cell so that all text remains visible?

Otherwise s there a way to either make a merged set of cells expand down another row if it needs more room to display all the text being typed in it? So if the merged cells were A1:C13 and someone keeps typing a lot, it would automatically extend to A1:C14 so that all text remains visible? Could this then 'push down' all other cells so that it doesn't overwrite anything?

**ChemistB** · 01-21-2011, 04:50 PM

If you have a protected spreadsheet but the cells you are working in are set to wrap text, the text should automatically wrap and the cell height expand. Is this not happening? What version of Excel do you have and how much text are we talking about here?

**Cheshire** · 01-21-2011, 05:25 PM

A bit more research showed that it was due to the fact I was working on merged cells, so auto-fit for height was disabled by design.

**ChemistB** · 01-21-2011, 05:43 PM

So, can you redesign? Merged cells cause many problems. Stay away from them.

**Cheshire** · 01-21-2011, 07:29 PM

Unfortunately I can't see any way to redesign it, and may be forced to use a vba macro to resize merged cells.

It is trying to simulate the feel of a word document. It may have a description above / infront of the box/cell in which to enter text, but unless that text can wordwrap within finite width dimensions (such as in the case of tables) while not being restricted to the width of a single cell when paragraphs of data need to be entered, I dont know what other choice I have aside from the resize macro.

(I found a resize macro for merged cells, but now the problem is I need to be able to protect the sheet while still allowing the cells to change their height. I will start a new post for that question)