How to design table in MS Excel or MS Word with varying cell sizes?

microsoft-excel microsoft-word

7,279

The Merge Cells feature is the only way to do what you want.

Select the cells you want to turn into one big cell and click the Merge & Center button:

After that you can change vertical and horizontal alignment as you wish.

If you need text to automatically wrap, format the merged cell like so:

Finished example:

7,279

Geoffrey West

GIS Specialist for City of Los Angeles Bureau of Sanitation

Updated on September 18, 2022

Comments

Geoffrey West over 1 year

How can I design a table in Microsoft Excel with varying cell sizes? I do not want to have the entire row as one size, but single cells as a specific size.
- Máté Juhász almost 8 years
  
  There is no way for that, in Excel all cells in a column has the same width. A workaround can be to decrease columns width and merge cells.
- Geoffrey West almost 8 years
  
  What is the best way to do this?
- Máté Juhász almost 8 years
  
  What exactly do you want to do? Why do you want to do it in Excel?
- Geoffrey West almost 8 years
  
  I want to create a table that has various sizes in cells pretty much different formats for different parts of the table.
- Máté Juhász almost 8 years
  
  why do you need to have it in Excel?
- Geoffrey West almost 8 years
  
  I don't necessarily, I figured this would be the easiest way.
- fixer1234 almost 8 years
  
  You can have whole rows or whole columns of different sizes. But by different, you're referring to both height and width different from surrounding cells, so more like a puzzle than a table? If you need to do that in Excel or Word, you will probably need to create lots of extra rows and columns and then merge cells to create the odd blocks.
- fixer1234 almost 8 years
  
  If misha256's answer isn't what you're talking about, add some kind of image that illustrates it (you can draw it in crayon on a napkin and snap a picture with your cell phone).
Geoffrey West almost 8 years

This is exactly what I was referring to, is there a way to set the inches of each cell, in the properties?
misha256 almost 8 years

Awesome, we're on the same page. Um, yes and no. Excel is a bit dumb. For example, when you try set the row height (imgur.com/Pmp1hX7) on merged cells, it applies the height you specify to each row that makes up the merged cells. So you have to do maths. If you want the merged cell height to be 1-inch, and it's made up of 4 rows, then you'll need to enter 0.25.