Within my Excel spreadsheet there are many cells that although they contain data, they do not respond when I try to automatically resize them. I've tried auto-fit, auto-hide (turning it off), etc.
Here is an image to show you what I am talking about
The only way that works is to resize manually or double-click when the resize button displays.
2 Answers
Select the rows surrounding them and then right click and Unhide.
2If you prefer not to hide and unhide, for any reason, especially that some columns in the contiguous group you want to properly size need to be hidden and you don't want to screw up re-hiding all of them, there's another approach when Excel refuses to perform the re-sizing, or worse yet, actually reduces their size.
It ain't pretty, but basically resize each column by dragging the right edge until it seems it is much wider than needed, or by bringing up the dialog box to type a new width and typing a LARGE number.
After the enlarging, the auto-resizing of choice WILL work. Of course, no guarantee that your "much wider than needed" enlargement was wide enough. If not, the resizing will narrow to the widest item with white space to its right. Anything still running past the right margin will not affect it, usually. (So overguess and adjust later if someone tells you something is cut off.) If you end up possibly wider than you'd like anyway, adjust down to the max width you'd like to see.
Likely someone would be happy to give a quick little VBA solution as well. Something involving, I believe, EntireColumn.AutoFit.
In fact, they could do a one-liner selecting the whole column the highlighted cell is in and perform that command upon the whole column selection. Then you could record that command somewhere, in a Named Range if nowhere else. When needed, you'd select a cell in the column you want to autofit, then launch the VBA module with Alt-F11, and find the Immediate Window. You'd paste the command string into the Immediate Window and press Enter to run it. That SHOULD do it nicely.
